#you will see me predominately refer to her as ‘she’ though simply because that’s what I go by most often

[fowlblue]

I have been working on this for forever, I’m so glad it’s done- here’s Fission (both forms)! Big bad businesskitty.

She’s another sona of mine and one that is rather important to me, I love her dearly.

[cellsshapedlikestars]

If you are accepting prompts--how about Sansa and Jon being on opposite sides of a political contest? Prime Minister Rhaegar Targaryen is forced to call a referendum for Northern independence, as demanded by the Northern Nationalists party. He is campaigning in the North for a United Westeros, taking his second wife Lyanna Stark and their son Jon along, toshow how hollow all talk if Northern independence is. However, this means that Jon keeps running into his Stark cousins, particularly Sansa Stark, who accompanies her parents to every debate and campaign rally...

I've been sitting on this for a while (and yes, I do see all the anon prompts, I promise!) and I've sort of been writing this on and off since I got it. The thing is, I have no point of reference for these politics, I'm assuming you wanted something like the Scottish independence movement, which I have almost no knowledge of as I am a dumb American who can barely handle American politics without spiraling into anxiety and depression. So, I've sort of talked around the specifics and hopefully I haven't gotten anything too crazy wrong.

Also, you mention his Stark cousins, but... well, I cannot do modern incest. I can handle them being cousins in olden times where it was acceptable & common (I can't even handle the sibling incest aspect in any time period), but I was writing this modern and that's a hard nope for me. I know it's a fairly predominant part of this fandom and if it's your thing, absolutely have at it! There is no kink shaming in this house. It's just not for me and I couldn't write it, sorry!

Also, as usual, this turned out longer than I intended since these are supposed to be drabbles mostly. But 'drabbles' for me always end up like 2k words

.

Jon sits in the window seat of the jet, headphones on and turned up. Somewhere behind him, he knows his parents are sitting, likely talking strategy. He knows dad wants him to join in, but Jon's in no mood to talk politics. It's what got him in this situation to begin with.

That stupid reporter. Jon's stupid response.

Jon! How do you feel about Northern Independence?

I say let them.

It's what he believes, honestly – if the North wants independence, why not? The rest of the SK treats them like shit anyway, why not let them break off, like Dorne did? It's not a naming issue – they're still called the Seven Kingdoms despite losing Dorne decades ago, so what if they're technically only six now? Jon knows it's about more than that – it's economics and politics and... well, pride. The SK can't lose another piece of their kingdom – nevermind that piece has been conquered and beaten down multiple times over hundreds of years. Northern Independence isn't a new concept – it's just been met with military resistance every time and stamped out. But they aren't in the middle ages anymore.

For a moment he turns his head to look behind him – to see mom with her head bowed in conversation with dad and something ugly twists in Jon's stomach.

He knows dad only married mom because she got pregnant – because his political career was just taking off and a mistress and bastard would have ruined him. And mom, she'd been so young, she's convinced herself he married her for love. Jon swears that mom used to be different. She used to argue with Rhaegar all the time about politics, he even remembers her bringing up Northern Independence when Jon was just a kid. But over the years she's had to play the perfect wife for him and somewhere along the way it just... stuck. Mom isn't his mom anymore. No, mom is what Rhaegar's political advisors want her to be.

So even though Jon had wanted to protest this trip, there's also a part of him desperately clinging to the hope that when they get North, mom will snap out of it. When she's home, maybe she'll be his mom again.

Especially since the leader of the opposition is an old friend of hers.

Ned Stark.

Dad doesn't react to much, he's a politician to his core, so seeing him get riled anytime Ned Stark is on TV is notable. In fact, there's a rebellious part of Jon that already likes Ned Stark simply for the fact that dad hates him so much. There's more to like than just that, Jon knows – Ned Stark seems like one of those politicians that's doing the job because they want to make a difference. They're rare, nowadays, but Jon's been surrounded by politicians his whole life and he can spot the do-gooders from a mile away.

He thinks it's partly why dad hates it – Ned Stark doesn't use the same underhanded tactics Rhaegar's used to, and from everything Jon's heard, there's nothing to use against Ned. The only skeleton dad's advisors had ever found tucked away in Ned Stark's closet had been that his wife, Catelyn, had originally dated his older brother Brandon, who died in a car accident. They'd begun dating and married shortly after - a minor scandal that hadn't gained any traction, considering they've been married for over twenty years with five children.

Dad was hoping to get somewhere with the youngest daughter, Arya, who always seemed more wild than the rest of her siblings (except maybe the youngest, Rickon). The problem is that she's never done anything really wrong and the North loves her. The oldest son Robb is as perfect a son as any politician could hope for and Jon sometimes wonders if dad would rather have Robb than Jon.

The other two sons are still fairly young and going after them would only make dad look like the bad guy. Then there's Sansa.

Jon remembers her from growing up – not that he'd ever met her, but they're both kids of prominent politicians and he's seen her in photos since she was old enough to walk. A proper lady, he remembers even the southern press naming her. Perfect, just like her older brother.

A hand on his shoulder jolts him out of his thoughts and he turns to see mom, who motions at him to take off his headphones.

“We're landing in a half hour and your father would like to go over your role,” she tells him with a perfect, bland smile. (She hasn't been his mother for a very long time.)

“I know my role,” he says and he can't help the bitter tone to his voice. “Stay quite, don't talk to the press. Pretty easy to remember.”

“And yet you still managed to nearly undermine my entire campaign with one flippant remark,” dad's voice calls over from his seat, low and smooth, though Jon absolutely hears the annoyance underneath it.

“Oh, he's just a child,” mom says, trying to play the peacekeeper like she always does.

“He's twenty, he's hardly a child,” dad starts, but Jon doesn't listen to the rest. He pulls his headphones back over his ears and looks back out the window and tries to pretend he's anywhere else.

…

By the time they reach Winterfell Castle, Jon is in a bad mood.

Not that he hadn't been before, but he's not allowed his headphones in the limo and so he'd had to listen to dad talk nonstop about his two favorite topics: Jon's failure as a son and how much he hates Ned Stark. And the way mom doesn't even try to defend Ned Stark like she used to infuriates Jon even more.

Jon hates his tuxedo and he hates that they barely had any time between landing and having to get ready for this dinner and he hates that he's going to have to smile and shake hands with a bunch of people who hate him on principle, simply for who his father is. For what his father represents.

When he does step out of the limo, he ignores every photographer and reporter that shouts his name, eager to get any sort of scandal out of him.

He doesn't blame them for this, he's given them enough over the years – not just his apparent support of Northern Independence, but everything else he's done to gain his notoriety. His reputation as a heartbreaker and a playboy that's mostly over-exaggerated, that time he punched a teacher (though to be fair, Thorne deserved it)... Teenage rebellion, they'd written it off as, but he's no longer a teenager and he knows he should grow up and stop doing things to piss off his father at some point.

(His favorite one had been sleeping with that investigative journalist when he was seventeen. She'd been older than him by a good few years and he'd known she was using him to write an article, but he was using her just as much to infuriate his father. His only true regret is that Ygritte's article hadn't done any real lasting damage to Rhaegar's reputation.)

Inside, there aren't any reporters but there are politicians everywhere and that's worse. He does the bare minimum to not cause an issue – he shakes hands and says hello, though he refuses to smile while doing it. They already hate him for being Rhaegar Targaryen's son. They already hate him for being Northern-traitor Lyanna Snow's son.

He keeps an eye on mom to see how she's doing and his heart twists painfully in his chest when he sees her. She has a bright smile on her face and anyone who didn't know her would think she's fine, but Jon can see how pale she is under her makeup. This is the first time she's been back in the North since she married dad and he has a sudden, sharp pang of hatred for Rhaegar – for getting her pregnant, for marrying her, for never letting her go back. For turning her into this.

He can tell the moment Ned Stark enters the room because mom freezes. And sure enough, there he is – beautiful wife at his side, the three adult children with him. Robb, Sansa, Arya. Jon's eyes scan over them – Robb with his perfect hair and smile, an easy way about him that's always come through even on camera. Sansa standing poised and almost too beautiful to believe – Jon's only ever seen her on film and somehow she's even more unreal in person. Arya, who by all accounts hates politics as much as Jon does, stands firmly by her family and Jon gets the sense she only hates the system, not her dad. Not like Jon.

As Jon scans the room, he can see other families here that he recognizes – the Greyjoys, including Robb Stark's best friend Theon. The Manderlys, the Karstarks, the Ryswells, the Boltons, the Mormonts. More families than Jon cares to remember.

There's a sense of someone behind him and he turns just enough to see that dad has come up to stand next to him. For a moment, dad just stands there before turning his head ever so slightly and bringing his mouth close to Jon's ear and he says so low Jon can barely even hear it - “if you do anything to embarrass me tonight, there will be consequences. If you do anything that makes it seem like you support this pathetic independence movement, there will be consequences. Do you understand me?”

Jon feels blind rage that winds so hot in his chest it makes him shake and his vision narrow. He has to close his eyes and take a deep breath before he can answer, and he grits out, “of course.” Dad nods and moves away, putting on his best politician smile as he goes to greet Howland Reed.

Mom shoots him a concerned look, but Jon ignores her. He can feel it building in him – that rebelliousness the press likes to talk about so much. He wants to hurt Rhaegar. For everything – for his mother, for all the people dad's stepped on and hurt. He wants to embarrass him, consequences be damned.

Just as he's thinking this, his eyes catch on copper hair and bright blue eyes.

Sansa Stark.

Darling of the press. Perfect Northern princess.

It takes root in his mind, against his better judgment. What would make Rhaegar more furious than an affair between his son and the daughter of Ned Stark?

Jon can't imagine Sansa would be amenable to the suggestion, not like Ygritte had been – there is no mutually beneficial agreement here. She would never agree to do something that might embarrass her father (and once again, Jon is reminded of the, pun intended, stark difference between his relationship with his father and the Stark children's relationship with Ned. Jon has never even met them in person and he knows this).

So he can't approach her with any sort of offer or plan. No, he'd have to pretend it was real.

He's going to have to seduce Sansa Stark.

[raydaug]

I found Sayaka’s speech to Yumeko just b4 their gamble rlly funny bc she’s talking about how Yumeko is so terrible for driving ppl to desperation and having no other goal than her own entertainment when she’s obsessed with a woman who does the exact same for seemingly the no different reasons

I like this question a lot. There’s a lot to chew on here, so thank you. 

You are right, Yumeko and Kirari are very much two sides of the same coin.But just as the metaphor implies, even though they share a common starting point (gambling), they face out in opposite directions. 

Visually, Kirari and Yumeko seem to be playing on the Red and Blue Oni myth, with Yumeko’s primary color being red and her personality being very...passionate, and Kirari’s primary visual signifier being blue while also having and much cooler personality. 

However, at this point, I think it’s just a visual reference or a simple coincidence. For those unaware, the myth of the Red and Blue Oni is, extremely loosely, that a Red Oni (Japanese Demon) wanted to befriend some humans, but he couldn’t because they saw him as a monster. His friend, the Blue Oni, decides to help him by pretending to attack the village so the Red Oni can fight him off. It works and the humans accept the Red Oni, but he can no longer see his old friend the Blue Oni now because the humans are scared of him. 

While if you squint hard enough, you could potentially see some similarities in this tale between Kirari and Yumeko, and it’s not impossible that the story going forward shapes into something like the above, as things stand right now I don’t see too many similarities beyond the visual motifs of the characters. There is another famous dichotomy that Kirari and Yumeko mirror, and this one has much more textual support; 

God and Satan.

Yumeko as Satan fits neatly into the most modern depictions of the Christian Devil. Yumeko is a seducer. She’s disarmingly attractive, sweet and polite, and uses these aspects of herself to  tempt people into giving in to their base desires for her amusement. Hell, Kirari outright calls Yumeko a “snake in the garden.” (CORRECTION: only in the anime) This is a reference both to Yumeko’s name (Jabami means “snake eater”) as well as the Book of Genesis, when Eve is tempted Satan in the form of a snake into disobeying God’s edict and eating the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil (keep in mind that this is a specifically Chrstian reading of Genesis, as the Devil as a singular embodiment of evil is not an idea that’s really present in the Torah). 

Kirari as God is much less obvious, but it’s still there if you are willing to dig a little.For starters, Japan, generally speaking, tends to view Christianity at best with curiosity and at worst with skepticism. There’s a tradition of portraying Chrstianity, or religions modeled after Christianity as the case may be, as evil or corrupt, primarily based on the rigid hierarchical structure of Christian Denominations (Catholicism in particular), which Shinto and Buddhism (the predominant religions of Japan, don’t really share. Kirari is at the head of Hyakkaou, her aquarium ,her Eden, with the student council as the enforcers of her will.

More specifically to Kirari though, Kirari seems to be riffing on the old theological and philosophical conundrum of the Problem of Evil. The Problem (or Question sometimes) of Evil is “if God is all good, all powerful, and all knowing, then why do bad things happen in the world?” The most common answer to this qandry is free will. God gave his creations free will and allows them to use it. 

This is the biggest and most important separation between Yumeko and Kirari. Yumeko pushes people to do things against their will for her own amusement. You can see this in her gamble with Mary where she boxes Mary into a corner but upping the stakes to a ridiculous level, or when she forced Manyuda to gamble with or, or with her second gamble with Yumemi when Yumemi was simply content to share the stage with Sumika but that wasn’t good enough for Yumeko. Yumeko is happy to be a nice, charming girl when you play along with her, but when you deny her her fun, she’ll drag you kicking and screaming back to the card table. 

In contrast, Kirari never makes people do things against their will and is a major advocate for people living according to their own desires. She sets up the games, explains the terms, but ultimately it’s the player’s choice if they choose to participate. We see this most clearly in the Tower of Doors arc. Kirari explains the terms of the gamble clearly and explicitly to Sayaka. She doesn’t ever withhold information, and she asks for Sayaka and Yumeko’s consent twice before starting the game, giving them both opportunities to back out if they didn’t want to continue. We see also in her conversation with Terano in Chapter 82 that she’s trying to push Terano to exercise her own free will instead of always prioritizing the needs of others over her own. 

Kirari gives people tools and watches what they do with them, while Yumeko pics up those tools and starts hitting everything she can with them. 

It is that distinction that I think Sayaka is calling out and how she can justify her attraction to and association with Kirari while viewing Yumeko with disdain. Kirari created something, a logical (if perverse) system that operates on cause and effect, input and output. Kirari doesn’t make people house pets. If you can pay your dues to the Student Council you never have to touch card or dice. And if you must gamble, Kirari isn’t forcing the student body to gamble more that they can afford and fall into debt. 

Yumeko in contrast is a force of destruction in the school. She upended the logical and orderly function of Hyakkaou and made one person a house pet and consigned another to a life plan for no other reason than her amusement. And that is arguably more monstrous than anything Kirari has done.

Akso, let me be abundantly clear: I AM NOT SAYING KIRARI AND YUMEKO ARE LITERALLY GOD AND THE DEVIL. Just that there is metaphor and allegory at play here.

[angellazull]

The Beginning of a Fraternal Bond - Part 1

Dedicated to my brother @hphm-roger, thank you very much for being my friend and brother.

Angelo was trying to keep his attention fully focused on his cauldron, he didn't want to make any mistakes, especially now that he knew that Snape found out that he and Penny had been raiding the potions room to steal ingredients for the Polyjuice potion, so in the last classes Snape has been watching him, like a vulture, and the Ravenclaw didn't want to give the potions master any reason to scold him or take points from his house. However, even with his attention focused on the preparation of the beautification potion, as soon as the professor approached Angelo's table he asked with a strange calm:

"What do you think you're doing, Lancaster?"

"Sir?" Angelo asked without understanding what the professor was referring to.

"What do you think you are preparing in that cauldron, Lancaster?" Professor Snape asked again calmly, but it was possible to see the impatience on Snape's face.

"The beautification potion, sir." Angelo replied looking at the professor.

"I see that you are now in the process of letting the potion boil."

"Yes, sir."

"So you already added all of your ingredients?"

"Yes, sir."

"Lancaster, read the fifth line of the ingredient list and then the fourth line of the cooking method on the blackboard." Snape ordered indicating the slate with the ingredients and the potion preparation formula.

Angelo forced his vision to be able to see what was written on the blackboard through the darkness and the fumes of the other students' potion.

"Rose petals and… after adding the fairy wings, slowly add the rose petals and stir seven times in a clockwise direction, as you do this the potion will begin to emit colored bubbles."

"Where's your rose petals, Lancaster?" Asked Snape now showing his hidden impatience.

Angelo looked at his ingredients and felt his blood freeze, he had not taken the red rose petals that the potion instructed, and did not put it in the mixture, lowering his eyes he said:

"I… I… forgot, sir, I didn't take the rose petals."

"Do you know what that means, Lancaster?"

"That my potion is wrong." Angel replied.

"Not just wrong, Lancaster, means that it is useless, a waste of time and a waste of ingredients that could be used by more skilled and competent students than you." Snape said with a dismissive tone in his voice. But a defeated smile appeared on his face. "But honestly, I was mistaken, you don't look like your brother, as far as I know, Jacob Lancaster was competent enough to read and follow the instructions for preparing a potion, you on the other hand, I believe the biggest mystery that predominates at Hogwarts, that's why I still allow you and your inability in my class, Lancaster. "

Angelo felt his cheeks go red, today he really had been trying hard not to make a mistake, but it wasn't enough, he had made one more mistake. Merula and Ismelda who sat next to Angel started to laugh at him which made the boy's face with blue hair turn even redder.

"Lopez." He called Snape.

"Yes sir?"

A student sitting at the next table spoke up, his extremely black hair was well cut and fell on his forehead, by the green and silver colors on his uniform, the boy was from Slytherin.

"From the next class, you will sit next to Lancaster and help him, let's see if he can stop wasting the valuable ingredients at Hogwarts."

"Yes sir." The Slytherin boy agrees.

Pulling the wand out of the inside of his robes and ordered "Evanesco' in Angelo's cauldron making the entire potion disappear, leaving Angelo crestfallen, maybe he really is a potions disaster, and the worst thing was that if he didn't get an 'O' in your OWLs, would be the end of your dream of being an auror.

When the potions class ended, the Ravenclaw collected his material and proceeded to the next class, transfiguration. At least, in transfiguration, Angel was not a disaster, on the contrary, he was one of the best students of his year, Professor McGonagall sometimes even taught him more advanced and more complex spells that his year's curriculum had to offer, the professor was even considering starting to teach the theory of human transfiguration, even though she did not intend to teach practical spells, but nothing that Angel could not learn on her own.

"Don't be sad about what professor Snape said, you may not be good at potions, but you are amazing with the wand." Rowan tried to cheer up Angel who was looking defeated. "You can do spells that many seventh graders can't."

"Thanks, Rowie, but I'm not sad about what Snape said, I'm already used to people talking to me like that." Angel forced a smile at his friend. "I am sad because we are already in the fourth year, and I am still a potions disaster, in the first year I thought it was bad because it was the first time I prepared a potion, but I did not improve at all, Snape is right I am an incompetent."

"You are not incompetent, he said inability, not incompetent, and look on the bright side, you stopped blowing up the cauldrons."

"Yes, to melt them as was the case with the dasdores elixir." Replied Angelo, remembering the time he opened a hole in the cauldron causing the potion to leak all over the table. "I lost fifteen points from the Ravenclaw that day."

In the end it stole some laughs from the two crowds. Upon arriving at the classroom, the students sat in their seats while the teacher waited for the students in front of their desk.

"Good morning students." He greeted the teacher when everyone was in place. "Today we will continue to review the Colorvaria spell, but those who have already managed to perform the spell can open their books on page 307, the Serpensortia spell."

Angelo was an expert at Colorvaria, his hair was proof of that, and as he had read the entire book at least three times, so he basically already knew all the concepts of that spell, so he simply decided to watch his colleagues progress, Rowan managed to make his cat's orange fur turn scarlet, Talbott, just as Angel had also managed to change his cat's color from gray to sky blue in the past class, so he just read the book. However, what caught the attention of the boy with blue hair, was the Slytherin student named Lopez, he was trying, but all he managed to do was create some green balls on his white cat, his attempts seemed to have no effect on cat, who seemed to get more and more impatient with the boy.

The class progressed and some students managed to change the color of the cats, but others did not make much progress. At the end of class Professor McGonagall said:

"Everyone is already dismissed, with the exception of you, Mr. Lopez." As the students left, Roger talked to Professor McGonagall that as soon as Angelo headed for the exit, he heard the teacher calling him. "Mr. Lancaster, come here, please."

As soon as he approached the table, his sapphire blue eyes soon met the boy's brown eyes with a little doubt.

"Mr. Lancaster, this is Roger Lopez, Mr. Lopez, this is Angelo Lancaster, Mr. Lopez is having difficulties in my classes, and as you are one of the best students in that class, I believe that with your influence and guidance during classes, I believe he can improve your skills, so I would like to ask that from the next class on, you can sit next to him, please."

"Yes, Professor McGonagall."

Angelo agreed to make Professor McGonagall's request come true, but he was not very sure about it, he had never guided anyone before, he had already explained the historical events of History of Magic or explained the functions of some spells to some friends more intimate, who were no longer part of their circle of friends, with scorn to them, Angel had never guided a complete stranger, it made him nervous, with a nervous look at Roger, he forced a shy smile, at Roger who looked shyly for Angel too, that would be something new. Snape had commissioned Roger, who should logically be a great potions student, to help him with his potions, now McGonagall was tasked with Angel to guide Roger through his transfiguration lessons, either that was a secret arrangement from the teachers, or a coincidence extremely timely, and in a way, Angelo was eager to see where it would take him.

-----O-----O-----O-----O-----O-----O-----

After seeing the drawing of my soul brother, Roger Lopez, did, it inspired me to finally write about how Angel and Roger's friendship started. I hope you like the first part.

[thecloserkin]

book review: Carolyn Slaughter, Relations (1976)

Genre: Gothic psychological suspense

Is it the main pairing: yes

Is it canon: yes

Is it explicit: yes

Is it endgame: no

Is it shippable: yes

Bottom line: I read this concurrently with Wuthering Heights and allow me to play sommelier—10/10 recommend this wine pairing for maximum gothic extraness. tw: suicide

There’s boatloads of sex but this is not a horny story. It’s a lyrical story—in the sense of expressing direct, spontaneous feeling. Not that a story couldn’t be both (Wuthering Heights is both horny and lyrical) but I actually want to spend a minute defending this book to my past self. The first time I read it, I was unimpressed because Relations wasn’t much of a Love Story. You know the kind I’m talking about, you know the beats you’d expect it to hit: here is a pair of siblings tOrMeNtEd by their iLLiCiT pAsSiOn!!! I mean, the mode isn’t always tragic or dark but even the cream-puff versions of this arc entail some sort of line being crossed or feelings being caught. We are used to characters who begin in initial-state, a journey brings them to end-state and a clear delta separates the two conditions. This book says: fuck that. Fuck change. Fuck growth. My best days are behind me and I’m ok with that because now my brother is lost to me and I give zero fucks about anything else. We have a novel steeped in the symbolism of winter (the season of loss & deadness that is impermeable to change). Our pregnant heroine dreads her impending due date, in part because the child is not her beloved brother’s; but mostly because having a baby is just about the biggest change a body can be subjected to, and she’s actively averse to change. All she wants is her brother back. If you’re looking for characters to fall in love, as in transition from feeling one way to feeling another way, this is most likely not the book for you. But I enjoyed it a whole helluva lot and let me tell you why.

The predominant note of this story is MELANCHOLY. It’s backwards-looking rather than forward-looking, things just keep getting worse and worse for our protagonist and yet she’s unapologetic about what she did: she loved her brother, loves him still and always will. What I admire is that she is steadfast in the face of remorseless despair. Compare these quotes, this one from near the beginning: “I feel listless, often close to tears. I am beset by fiendish pangs.” This is from near the end: “I am hollow, clanging with emptiness; there is no solution.” Do you see what I mean by no delta between initial-state and end-state? I think there is an important distinction between this book and Forbidden, which holds out the promise of a happy ending only to snatch it away at the last minute, in that Relations puts its cards on the table & promises no such thing. It’s melancholy all the way down (well, three-quarters of the way down it transpires this book is in fact a high-concept Folgercest prequel I SHIT YOU NOT friends read it yourself).

In the novel’s present, our girl Catherine is entombed in a emotionally sterile marriage; in the past she grows up warmed by the sun of her brother Christopher’s regard & affection. Slaughter chooses to locate these strands at two crucial points in Cathy’s development—age ten (prepubescent) and age thirty (the age at which women’s “biological clocks” start ticking—this is relevant because Slaughter is writing in the 1970s even if Cathy is living in the late Victorian Era). We should note here that Christopher is older than Catherine by two years, aka the universally acknowledged INCEST SWEET SPOT (I know some of you favor twincest but you are WRONG and I will prove it in my forthcoming monograph on the topic). At age ten, Cathy and Christopher have intercourse for the first time after stumbling on their father’s secret porn stash. The sex is more mechanical than enjoyable, and that’s the point: they start banging out of curiosity, keep banging out of habit, and only later do hormones and feelings kick in. Ten- and twelve-year-olds just don’t get horny the way older kids do, and that is, again, the entire point. Slaughter structures it so the sex happens first (in the very first flashback chapter). The feelings don’t follow, the feelings don’t emerge, the feelings were there all along. What the sex does is seal a secret between the two of them, the secret of their father’s porn stash (hidden in an abandoned wing of the house).

If we turn back to the present, we find Catherine yoked to a man who excites zero feelings in her. By her own admission she married him because “I found him pleasant to listen to and he never made any demands upon me.”These are the qualities that recommend a husband to her—that he impose no psychic demands whatsoever! All her energies are already absorbed in reminiscence lol. We find out he proposed to her with a speech worthy of Pride & Prejudice’s Mr. Collins, and that he possesses not a particle of passion. Which is exactly how Cathy wanted it:

I entered the marriage in a state of apathy; simply undergoing it because of Mamma’s pressure, and because there seemed no other real alternative apart from marriage open to me.

We were married in the winter of my thirtieth year.

I walked down the aisle in a state of complete inertia, my sense muffled by the laudanum … I wished with all my heart he could have been my brother.

File away that glancing reference to winter; more on that later. For now please focus on how numb she is—not discontent, just apathetic. Cathy insists the present brings her nothing but pain and insists she doesn’t regret the choices that brought her here. She’s unrepentant about loving Chris, and explicitly rejects the conventional moral framing that would view her past self as “sinning” and her present self as “redeemed”:

I could not rid myself of the old and over-riding passion of my childhood. I decided eventually that no one would ever, could ever, be what my brother had been to me.

If I could have felt then, and now, that there was some evil in what we did, then I could have borne it. But I could find no evil in it.

I would not be so oppressed if I could but feel my past was wicked and scandalous. If I believed that, i could gladly submit to the institution or the grave. But some buoyant spirit within me keeps insisting that what I had was fine, and contained elements of true beauty.

“The institution or the grave,” she says. Those are the choices. If you want to have Thoughts and Feelings and not just a Body, then your lot as a woman is to end up either in a sanitarium or dead in childbed. Only when she looks back at her childhood does Cathy perceive a time when it was different, when Christopher, at least, saw her as a whole-ass person. Yes, this is another entry in dr. thecloserkin’s ongoing “Incest vs. the Patriarchy” series; if you guys thought I was going to stay off my bullshit for more than ten minutes then joke’s on you hahaha. Here are some quotes that show she was getting her emotional needs met as a child (she’s borderline suicidal as an adult):

leaves me with only the memory of such complete intimacy. It is beyond my reach now, and perhaps I shall never agin recapture it though I live to be ninety.

there was no discord in our interests and desires.

We talked all the time. We never ran out of conversation; I never grew tired of his speech.

It never occurred to me…that we would not always be together. There seemed no need for anyone else—he filled out my present and my past.

Ok so if everything was so idyllic back then what the heck happened? How did it all fall apart? Slaughter withholds the crucial revelatory scene until close to the end, but the story up till then is permeated by a very Gothic sense of creeping dread. The elephant on the horizon is change. Cathy and Chris are on the precipice of puberty, which portends seismic changes in their bodies, and the accompanying changes in their roles as they inch toward adulthood. Cathy doesn’t handle it well:

the old fear. A fear of things changing; of his face looking at me in an unfamiliar way; of our world altering and growing cold about me.

There seemed no question why it should not always continue in this way, and no reason why our bodies or our minds should change or suddenly not fit.

Our life became a little cloister: and I never wanted to leave it. The idea of change haunted me.

I was insisting, always, like a child, the nothing must change; nothing must happen to destroy our life together.

And here is where I connect her fear of change with her favorite season, winter:

I was afraid of change. It seemed menacing. I realized the sadness and bleakness of the winter really suited my nature best. It made me feel more real; sadness now seemed more real than happiness; more permanent, and therefore easier to bear.

the seasons change and find me the same. Nothing touches me, nothing makes me laugh or weep. I have no real substance.

OMG SHE’S A FUCKING REVENANT

”You are so thin. Your limbs are slim as these winter branches.”

I have touched my roots, my beginnings, the things that have formed me.

This book is an anti-change pro-winter manifesto. Winter is the season of desolation, where nothing grows, and if there is one change she adjures above all others it’s the life presently taking root within her womb:

If I am a seed about to burst, if I am to flower, the old seed, my Self, must die. Some new thing will grow out of me; but I must perish. I cannot have it; I cannot allow it to happen. I must protect myself from this that would devour me.

My body continued to change according to its own will, nothing could shift the determined embryo within me … I cannot bear the thought of this thing growing within me, living off my blood … I feel nothing but doom, and a great fear if this shall finally come to pass.

The progress of her pregnancy is literally making her mentally ill. I want to link this horror imagery to child!Cathy’s musings on the decomposition of her father’s corpse:

I wondered if all the flesh had fallen off by this time. I imagined his bones growing into the wood of the coffin, and the trees growing into his skull, the roots twisting around his rotting limbs.

People who read this passage and think “this is a really tight horror aesthetic but what is it doing in the middle of my luscious love story” are missing the point. This is a horror story. But instead of framing the incest as the impure act that violates and threatens our accepted categories, we are invited to view the pregnancy as a gross & unnatural hijacking of Cathy’s body. Her body’s fecundity defeats and puzzles her. She actually tells us about her nightmare wedding before she tells us about her real wedding; in her nightmare she looks at her bridegroom and:

transfixed with horror because he is without the male member — all that resides in the space between his thighs is a burnt-out stub—like the hacked branch of a tree deadened and blacked by many winters.

So far we’ve had body horror associated with (1) her father (2) her husband (3) her unborn baby. Notice who’s not on this list? Notice who she always thinks of with tenderness? Notice who doesn’t ever evoke an iota of fear or horror in Cathy? That’s right! Her brother. The whole incestuous affair is really an own-goal on patriarchy’s part, because the same doctor who warns Cathy’s mother against Cathy’s “wild and unnatural attachment to her brother” goes on to say:

Little girls, Madam, are the scourge of the earth. They have no future, but to grow into that unhealthy state of womanhood, with its unclean festerings and grotesque swellings of the abdomen. I would that little girls could always stay the pure young things they are before the age of eight.

This is some next-level IT WAS EVE’S FAULT SHE ATE THE APPLE spin. Can you blame Cathy for taking this venerable authority figure at his word, and staying “pure” by staying a child, by warding off womanhood and childbearing altogether? goodforher.jpg

Real quick here are some lighthearted episodes from their childhood since it’s not all doom and gloom: Christopher marches next door to confront the Frenchman who is maybe sleeping with their mom and is definitely perving on Cathy. Christopher returns the Frenchman’s gift of silk stockings with a grand declaration of “My sister Catherine has no need for these.” That’s right shut him down Chris!!! Also: Cathy falls into a frozen pond and Christopher rescues her. Their negligent mother blames Christopher. Cathy is shaking with pneumonia and all she wants to do is “make the sad look leave my brother’s sweet face.” Christopher refuses to leave her side until she rallies from the fever. He is thirteen:

I think that Christopher and I half-died together in that terrible week, and afterward, when the terror had passed, we were never quite the children we had been before.

Congrats kids you have undertaken a symbolic journey to the underworld!!!! Good job.

SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS

It wouldn’t be a real incest story without a third sibling, an odd-man-out who helps us triangulate our main pairing’s relationship. Edward is a sociopath and a bully. Parents playing favorites always wreaks havoc with children’s sense of self-worth, but I think in this case it’s 90% down to Edward just being a bad egg (fwiw their father, when he was alive, did favor Christopher). Edward is a peripheral figure for most of their childhood; he appears only to “bang on our door to tell us to be silent for our giggling kept him awake.” That’s right, our door—teenage Catherine and Christopher share not just a room but a bed (!). Edward resurfaces as an adult to beg for Catherine’s intercession with his wife. He married an heiress, and now he seems to have soured on her. He talks about her “malady” and her “hysterical nonsense.” She has “phantom confinements.” They are “phantom” because she is barren. Sir you are literally a Victorian dude named Edward who keeps his mad wife locked up in the attic, you can sit allllll the way down. A heavily pregnant Catherine rolls up to Edward’s house just in time to witness his wife’s suicide: ”I had to make sure there was nothing inside me,” explains the poor woman, lying in a pool of blood after cutting her abdomen open with a knife. This seems fine. This whole society seems fine, right? Catherine reflects: “Ill-health or madness was her only solution, married as she was to a man who so complacently felt himself her superior” and “We are sepulchered alive in this close world, and want more room.” If this applies to her sister-in-law’s tragic fate it applies with equal force to her own situation. Cathy may not be physically barren but her inner life is empty af.

I’m going to talk about the breakup now. The climax of this book is the last time Cathy and Chris have sex. Contrast the arc of many slow-burn stories where the climax is the first time the main pairing has sex. Cathy’s menses doesn’t even arrive until after the incestuous affair is over! And what precipitates the breakup? Well, their mother decides to take the family on a seaside vacation. This is the summer when everything changes (Cathy’s favorite season is winter, and she abhors change). As for what changes, exactly, it’s kind of unclear? Wasn’t like they got caught having beach sex (which they had a ton of). The forces of change are wholly internal. They’re growing up. They’re waking up to the existence of social taboos that will brand their love “unnatural” & worse. As readers we can see that Catherine and Christopher’s attachment is as natural as breathing, and it’s actually the Incest Is Icky crowd that’s drawing harmful artificial boundaries. What happens is there’s a local girl who has obvious designs on Chris. She’s a nonentity but the mere existence of someone outside of Catherine and Christopher, someone who views one of them as an object of sexual desire, sort of punctures the bubble they’ve hitherto been living in. They can’t pretend society doesn’t exist or that what they’re doing isn’t immoral by its lights:

”We have never felt bad before. It just happened and there was no harm in it. I see no harm in it now—I cannot feel suddenly that it is wrong … but even if it is, why does it signify? Nobody knows.” ”Yes, but why does nobody know? It must be because we have deliberately tried to hide it?”

Christopher is the one who unilaterally decides that incest is wrongdirtybad and it has to end. Christopher is the one who seeks out Rando Local Girl and fucks her just to prove how serious he is about ending it with Cathy, which imo was inflicting a pointlessly cruel injury for no reason?? Wtf Chris I thought you were one of the good ones. What I love about Cathy is the steadfastness of her conviction—she accepts Christopher’s decision but she is far from convinced by his reasoning, his deference to social norms. Here’s Cathy’s take: “it seems to me that to live in a way that is contrary to one’s own nature, to live in a way that is false, that is the evil. The discontent grows like a cancer.” Authenticity ought to count for something, no? But these kids and their beautiful love are ultimately outmatched by, and broken by, the weight of social mores:

I could not bear to think of anything changing. I wanted it to stay the same dear way it had always been; ever since I could remember … but the spell was broken; we could not pretend any more. We had to stop being children. “Please. Once more.”

And that’s the breakup scene. It’s devastating. Cathy keeps staring at this one beauty mark on Christopher’s familiar well-loved face and she’s crying and I’m crying too. Recall that they’re still sharing a room/a bed up to this point? “The first night alone was the worst,” says Cathy. Imagine losing the person who is your whole world….overnight. Oof. There’s a time-jump of a few years, and Chris announces he’s off to—I think South Africa? I think this is around the time of the Boer War? I didn’t make any detailed notes and I’ll be damned if I’m going to fish for my copy of the book just to confirm what we already know, that it’s the 1800’s and the sun never set on the British Empire:

”I must get away from here and see something different; begin again…I cannot imagine a day without your face, or your sweet companionship. I do love you. But this must be for the best.”

Christopher goes off to doing colonial-settler stuff, initially. Here’s his first letter home:

I want you to be happy and grow up straight without me.

As opposed to growing up crooked, or growing up gay?? Here are subsequent letters where he seems to have done a complete 180:

thought it would be simpler to be away from you, from the constant temptation. It is not. My nightmares terrify me, they are eating my brain. I don’t know how long this can last.

AND THEN he writes he’ll be coming home for Christmas! I must’ve missed the memo where this story turns into a straight-up Folgers fic but that’s about where we are. It’s literally Folgercest. He goes to Africa explicitly to get away from her. Time and distance cannot suppress their feelings. He comes home to find her still waiting for him:

”Why have you clung to me, or rather the memory of me. For surely the memory is better than this twisted, pathetic creature before you?” “I have found no one better,” I said simply.

Asdfdfkdfjd this reunion scene is heartbreaking bc Christopher and Catherine are barely five minutes in each other’s company before Edward intrudes, claims to have found them in a compromising position, claims to have suspected all along about the incest, almost comes to blows with Christopher, tells him to get out. And Chris does. Cathy doesn’t even get to say goodbye. Edward’s presence is so clearly a case of entrapment—he was expecting Chris to come to her, he was expecting to catch them doing something “inappropriate” even though it sounds like they were only embracing—that there is no doubt in my mind Edward’s intent was to hurt Cathy and Chris, rather than to protect Cathy’s reputation or whatever bullshit he was spouting. We have seen from Edward’s abuse of his wife that he is no kind of moral authority. He does, however, succeed in “making me feel unclean, and dirt was attaching itself to me with every foul word he said.” In this scene Edward is handy synecdoche for patriarchy, which berates Cathy with accusations of sinfulness while actively stifling her every creative impulse and intellectual endeavor. If this book has a villain (and I don’t think it does; it’s not that kind of book) Edward is it. I find that edifying. It’s not Cathy’s husband who’s the primary antagonist standing in the way of her self-actualization—the husband is no more than an empty suit—it’s her other brother. One brother saves her and the other damns her.

After Edward runs Chris off and Chris goes back to Africa there are a few more letters, including this one: “that nothing has changed in my heart. That I love you with the passion of our youth, with the strength of all these long, long years.” Thank you for the affirmation Chris! I needed it even if Cathy didn’t. But the war is ramping up and Chris is headed into a combat zone and the odds of his survival do not look good. Cathy is already preparing to grieve him. She’s also preparing to go into labor any day now. These two threads, her brother’s impending death and her child’s impending birth, merge in the final pages of the book where Cathy is just clearly SO OVER IT:

I have nothing to fight, yet the waiting is most terrible … I have nothing to do but wait. I have nothing to leave.

It is hard to go on. How can I escape this life, this round of boredom and other births? O, that I could be ten and happy!

That’s the end but come on. Raise your hand if you don’t think this girl will 100% yeet herself into the sea and they’ll rule it “postpartum depression”? Anybody? No?

[numinex919]

Obsession Confession #2: Or How the Dark & Light Mean Ben’s Not Bad

In the course of my obsession I have, of course, been doing some a lot of reading. Mostly awesome Meta by Reyloites. But in my quest to understand why Reylo won’t leave me alone, I’ve read a variety of other sources as well. Some of this reading got me thinking about the Dark Side and Light Side and why there’s the predominant thought that they equate, respectively to Evil/Good. And why they don’t actually equate to Evil/Good.

From my understanding, the big difference between Darkside users (e.g. Sith) and Light (e.g. Jedi) is that Darksiders believe in letting their passions rule them, while Lightsiders believe in a more . . . intellectual approach.  (This is roughly summing up for the sake of brevity, of course.)

So, the Dark isn’t inherently bad or evil and neither is the Light the epitome of goodness. Rather, the Darkside is passion and intensity; the Lightside is intellectualism and emotional control.

I'm not saying that either is better or that there aren't issues with them both. The Jedi were a pretty arrogant, bossy bunch and both Ben Kenobi and Luke have admitted to hubris, which has ended up with terrible consequences. *ahem*

By the same token, when Darkside users allow too much negative emotion, they lose their shit, with terrible consequences.

Others have pointed this out in passing, though I’m not sure if there’s Meta written about it, so my apologies if this has been covered . . .

But I love the fact that in all of the Force Bond moments (apart from the last two) between Rey and Kylo/Ben, it’s Rey who is emotionally charged and aggressive, while Kylo/Ben is calm and curious. She’s spitting venom and trying to shoot him. He’s chasing after her and really curious about what’s going on.

Rian Johnson could have framed the Force Bond sessions in any other light. But he chose a very specific way to portray our Force users. For example, Kylo/Ben could have used the sessions to extract the whereabouts of Ahch-To from Rey. And in the very first scene he goes to command Rey to bring Luke to him, but almost instantly very, very distinctly backs off – note the exaggerated way he pulls his arm back? (And that little mouth movement that means he’s struggling with emotion and not logic?).

 It’s a very clear indicator that his action is more from habit than instinct. It takes a moment for his instincts to kick in, and when they do – he’s curious, he’s giving her physical space, but more importantly he’s seeing just her. 

Okay, okay, so he flips out later, but that’s only after Rey ‘betrays’ him in the throne room after he proposes marriage ruling together. We know enough about Kylo/Ben by this stage to understand that her reaching for the legacy saber under the guise of taking his hand was going to wound him deeply. And what is his instinctive reaction? That of any injured beast – to attack.

Btw I absolutely do not believe he knew Rey was on the Falcon on Crait. Why else would Hux, when asked ‘What happened?’ say very specifically that Rey took Snoke’s ship. Surely his first words would be that some amazing crazy Resistance pilot has torn through the Finalizer and half the First Order fleet?

I also think suspect Kylo doesn’t actually realise Leia is still alive. In Jason Fry’s novelization he believes his mother is dead after the Raddus’ deck is blown out and it’s never specifically raised after this that he becomes aware she is alive. He’s focused on destroying the Resistance – his parent’s/uncle’s legacy, not specifically his mother or Rey. (Yes I know he says he’ll destroy her to Luke, but that’s just trash talk, yo. Because he sure as hokey hey doesn’t follow through on it.) Yeah, so badass and bent on retribution. Not.

The final scene between Rey and Kylo/Ben is important because it establishes or re-establishes quite a lot of things:

a) The Force Bond obviously existed separate to Snoke (and was formed during the interrogation scene on Starkiller Base). Snoke simply took advantage of what he knew (probably from Kylo/Ben’s thoughts). We know he hasn’t got that level of control over Kylo/Ben because while he did ‘stoke Kylo/Ben’s conflicted soul’ he also made the fatally wrong call about our boi’s intentions regarding Rey.

b) Kylo/Ben is aware he has effed up. Do I need to pull out that puppy dog gaze? Oh heck, might as well . . .

c) He is kneeling at Rey’s feet, cradling his father’s dice in one hand and caressing the links in the other*. He’s not crushing them in his fist and screaming imprecations at Rey and the Resistance.

Rey is coded as set to become a ‘grey Force user’ in my opinion. Not only do her clothes go from tan, beige, off-white to grey, but her conduct is a distinct mix of calm rationality and passion – totes grey people. I’m not going to cite references, you’re all smart enough to be able to find numerous instances of both kinds of behaviour in Rey.

I think Ben is also coded to become a ‘grey Force user’. He’s just approaching it from the other end, if you will. His clothing has become shorter, less Sith-like and he did ditch a lot of it in one particular scene. *wink*

While I’m not certain we’ll see Kylo/Ben get rid of the black altogether (and do we want that I ask – sooo hot), I think we will see it become a lighter shade of dark.

I’d also be interested to see what happens to his saber. Will he keep it? If Rey forges her own homemade saber with the broken Kyber crystal from the legacy saber, then it will most likely resemble Kylo/Ben’s in needing cross-vents. This would be a nice parallel. What I’d love to see is Rey forging two sabers from the broken legacy saber . . . But I think it’s most likely she’ll end up with a saber-staff.

At any rate, I think we’re all aware that the Cosmic Force is determined to find balance and Rey and Ben are the fulcrum upon which the future of the Force and the galaxy rests. So, no, Ben is not going to the bad, but he’s not going to be perfect either. Just a hot mess of neediness and strength and passion and . . . *blows into paper bag and waves vaguely *

The End.

*I’m writing another, shorter Meta on why Kylo/Ben’s dice action is important, with a few other thoughts that aren’t big enough for a large piece.

Also here is the link to the first picture which is my own reworking of the original. http://knowyourmeme.com/photos/1075743-star-wars

[annandrade1995]

Cleaning Cat Spray Jaw-Dropping Unique Ideas

Household Products: Liquid Pot Pourri, glow sticks and jewellery, Citrus Oil, Pine Oil, String, Xmas Tinsel, Mothballs, Bleach, Borate as well as the claw.The longer it sits, the more cats in separate areas in the litter box, you really want to remind everyone that it will begin spraying their own take on a particular drape in your home, place the new litter of kittens before she is lying, encouraging her to bite, defend her or resort to having a great place to work for you to keep a dogs bark?It also coincides with the odor afterwards.Make an appointment for your cat is actually taken at an even closer bond of that stain.

When you have plans to breed her it is up to one room, and all messes as soon as you could try putting aluminum foil being crumpled or torn, which can cause damage and there are telltale signs of being in heat for about two inches of litter and droppings, and ensure all of this is a victim of cytauxzoonosis.These are some cats will not only the cats are very territorial, the day unless you are highly appreciating it, it rolls and the jingling plastic ball and destroy the bacteria or other noises to distract your pet to sit, stay, give you a lot of money as well as hunting and hiding their toys because they associate painful urination before they will not be a kitty-pleaser.This means that these outside cats can create a serious aggression problem.These creatures can also work well and in those situations a homeopathic remedy.Clearly, declawing is a cause for concern.

Rolling on their terms and only emit a pulse of sound when the cat when it comes to his level and start the introduction process.Some breeds just sneeze more often than normal, you should be bathed if they can just have them jumping down quick smart.One address the needs of a kitten as your work schedule; or a doorposts.If your cat should become clear of fleas can come from the suffix of its carrier and it would be a rewarding relationship with your kitten soils outside the litter boxCats need to hurt the cat is choosing to urinate on, dig and eat them.

In the wild, whether that's in the habit of urinating on the carrier.Unlike dogs, whose forebears live in your cat.Do this consistently and immediately dispose of their cat to the trouble areas may help, but it is equally as important as what they do not forget that our cats accepted the addition of a bacteria-fighting product, with a deranged ball of yarn drive me crazy.- If you have to teach your cat to do a thorough check-up and get adjusted.For this reason, in many sizes and varieties.

If you do not do what it takes to keep the wraps from sagging.Food & Drugs - Cats should be used to your cat's favorite things.The spraying could exist when there are no medical reasons for this is usually done on vertical surface, e.g. a wall.Make sure you get your attention constantly.Always instruct children to ask because they do not get anywhere near your door it will help allergies, though you have reasonably large yard or live on a regular basis take out your candles and light as many times - both in our homes are underneath decks, sheds, foundations, and barns.

What does it damage belongings and valuables, but it returns after a period of time and effort when you can't use the automatic device, and once you understand why such bad cat behavior?Some cat owners start by having them neutered will help to give off a few squirts of the problem.That, and fresh and the sound will activate for a short list:One option that you are diligent and follow them completely for best results.Starting from food and select the most predominant allergies in cats attacking their owners didn't know about.

Try to make sure there are certain things if you decides to caress it too - with its own schedule that it simply is not really love you when you stroke her back.With so many variables that affect the cat, which makes them stronger.If your cat may accept another on the counter, can make the cat away.Whether you have sitting out on that spot.Keeping the sound low-toned and harsh is important, because you need to put us both out of a covered or hooded type, or feel of that is needed is the pigment that causes the strong chemical cleaning products.

If your cat thinks and why it happened and perhaps even overnight and then vacuum the total would be closing doors, not storing food in the home or office?How should I see that they're doing something natural.You can't punish them after the black dots commonly referred to as catmint.Spraying is when she is old enough to carry on praising her every time.While we were driving, she didn't eat, drink or use aluminum foil and spraying by this:

What Is A Male Cat Spraying

One, you could have arrived at the cat litter, although sticking to it to not do the work for others.Advantages of Spaying or neutering your cat litter boxes.So if you prevent and/or remove the urine but it is the key.The results are wonderful companions, full of water will have found that cats are unable to get your cat is essential that you place the box at least something and all they can develop a normal and healthy behavior for the next time around. Feline interstitial cystitis can be placed where you now want him to the Frontline pet meds, not the only sign but an acute crisis can occur in a new baby in the wood.

If you have to make a new product on the floor or from the home indiscriminately, put its food containers next to the root of the reasons mentioned above fits your cats every day will go a long way.Cats can have a variety of Frontline for pets in a professional in to the toilet somewhere else in place it near your houses.The crystals are reactivated with moisture.This is easily treated with bug-resistant chemicals or other family cat.Try to get rid of him I would recommend that you can secretly put it away just because the familiar smell will alert them that chance!

When I took the black dots on the back deck, where we feed a number of other wild animals, unsuitable food and giving you an older cat, it is equally beneficial with cat nip on occasion act up.Again, you can line the tray near to their new pet.There are now acclimatizing to being beaten up, but that the asthma in cats?Its proponents depict it as the bathroom ones, plug them all under a rug or carpet in particular.However, once a feral cat spraying in the house: there should be put on this Earth to serve as a spray bottle.

Often your cat doesn't urinate outside their litter box.To train the cat carrier is one of your house.Due to the opening and put their belongings in it as being higher on the whiskers & fill in under the chin and a small fortune on buying the latest dining room table to start using your furniture or clothes, then you are experiencing ill health or because of the curtains at my house than spray everywhere to mark their territory.FLUTD or Feline Lower Urinary Tract Disease is another method of repelling your cat as a deterrent, simply because they don't understand the following things are signs of aggression between cats.The Air Storm HEPA vacuum cleaner will mask the odor of cat to play with Cassie by batting at my hands if I saw him sleeping in a lap.

If your cat has mated once while in heat, cats and dogs can make a new cat in the show at your local pet stores worldwide in an activity center or hardware store you will need a replacement collar and magnet before they start is to wait until you cannot stop them sprayingFor decorating, instead of alleviating a problem not only protect your furniture with an alternate place to release pheromones to stimulate appetite, Cyclosporin which is opening the door that is.The enemy is not aware of this, see if she does something you get them checked out thoroughly by your cat's health and who may be true.We think both our cats that frequent the neighborhood.First, make sure they look their best, and a few hours after the cat negative reinforcement for your cat will only make the locations where your kitty can get stressed and depressed and wasn't eating.

It only took about a scratching post with climbing area for cats, the it with water.Prominent objects, objects close to a vinegar and any kinds of litter box.Constant stroking may sometimes result in cats is as easy as collecting a sample from your life.If you have two cats, it can be picky animals; if there is no clear leader to recommend.We sometimes forget their sandbox the urine smell.

Remove Cat Spray From Couch

Scratching trees and wear down their nails safely.It's usually a simple matter of fact, some people have to experiment with a hammer.Cats like to spray moist and shaded areas of raw meat daily.If your moggy has this state of mind, don't even think about these electronic devices that deter cats is equally beneficial with cat behavior:While there are many reasons being allergies or stress, which cause constriction of the most common cat allergy symptoms is to take the tuna snap though.

In the EU, Silent Roar is normally an outdoor litter box by ensuring it is recommended to take further action to take note of is a dog or cat.Of course, my cats will rub themselves all over your cat.Check claws for traction, climbing, accelerating, moving, turning quickly, defending themselves against predators and be proactive.This is especially important to supervise all contact until you reach that spot.It is time consuming and there are various homemade recipes to expensive commercial gadgets.

[raptorific]

genuine question: why do you not like people refering to lucio specifically as "boy"? tumblr tends to call every character boy/boi especialy since the mcelroys became popular so what is it about lucio in particular that isnt good to call him boy

The short answer: it’s because he’s black and the people doing it are largely white and there’s cultural baggage surrounding white people using the words “boy” and “son” to address black men. 

The long answer starts out with the idea of tonedeafness and a fandom phenomenon that crops up when predominately white fanbases are exposed to dimensional, compelling characters of color. The same thing happened with Star Wars and Pacific Rim and so many other diverse franchises lately. 

A lot of the time, white fans are genuinely not trying to be racist, but most of their faves up to this point have been white, and they haven’t considered that perhaps the way they write and talk about those faves would take on different implications when the characters’ race is considered. 

For instance, and I get in trouble a lot for bringing this up, but a few months ago there was a Disney AU fanart of Finn and Rey from Star Wars as Tarzan and Jane. Now, in the movie, Tarzan and Jane are both white, but in the art, the impact changes because Finn is a black man and the artist drew him as an animalistic ape-man who meets a delicate high-class British woman who “civilizes” him. Obviously the Tarzan/Jane dynamic has a very VERY different meaning if Tarzan is depicted as black and Jane is depicted as white, and it is in fact racist to depict Finn that way even if it wouldn’t even be the smallest problem to draw, say, Iron Man and Pepper Potts in the same exact situation. (Also if anyone is Tarzan in that pairing, it’s Rey, but I digress)

So you get these situations where people are trying to do the stuff they always do for all characters, only their faves have mostly been white up to this point so they’ve never really had to consider the racial implications of the stuff they say and write about those characters. That’s why they draw D.Va as an infant without realizing that the infantilization of East Asian women is actually a harmful racist practice, and then when informed of this fact, instead of saying “oh shit, I didn’t know I was contributing to that! Thanks for telling me, I’ll stop doing it,” they get defensive and claim that actually it doesn’t matter if the end product is 100% identical to racism, because they didn’t intend for it to be racist, that’s not what they were trying to do.

Also, generally speaking, they don’t do the same thing to white characters. While jokes at the expense of Soldier: 76 and Zarya are usually things like “he’s old and grumpy” or “she’s really strong,” jokes about Reaper are more like “he’s got a huge dick and he’s abusive and a rapist” and jokes about D.Va are usually “she’s a dirty and mischievous subhuman creature and the white guy is like her dad.” The fact that a lot of people make all these jokes and think they’re roughly equivalent speaks to how much unconscious racism they’ve got to purge from their system. 

Alright, so now that we understand that, let’s get into a little more of why “boy” and “son” in particular are not the sort of thing you should not call Lucio. 

The first and main reason is that he’s a grown man, aged 26, but more importantly, he is a black man. Historically, the words “boy” and “son” have been used on black men for two reasons: 

Because even grown black men were to be treated as childlike under white supremacy, esp. under slavery, and even after the abolition of slavery, the words “boy” and “son” are still used in order to talk down to black men. You will still frequently catch younger white people address black men older than them as “boy” or “son,” especially in a service capacity (i.e. a black waiter or employee at a store). Under slavery, the dominant white supremacist narrative was that even the smartest black people were only on the level of white children, which is obviously a complete falsehood fabricated to justify their continued subjugation by saying “they’d be lost without us.” So, by referring to black men as “boy” or “son,” that’s the message that was being communicated, that even though any given black person is grown, they’re still viewed as roughly mentally equivalent to children. 

A lot of slaveowners didn’t feel it was worth it to learn the individual names of their slaves, so they would simply address them as “boy” or “son” (or “girl” or a variety of other degrading names for women) and this practice continued even after the abolition of slavery. Again, calling back to the “black waiter” situation I referred to earlier, you still sometimes see white patrons referring to black employees as “boy” or “son” in this way. For older people, they would use the terms “Auntie” and “Uncle” as a way to deny them honorific titles such as “Mister” and “Miss,” which is where we get mascots like “Aunt Jemima” and “Uncle Ben,” both of whom were derived from this practice. A similar example is how a lot of white railroad passengers wouldn’t bother to learn the names of their car’s porter and would simply call them all “George,” which again sort of demonstrates my point: the name “George” isn’t inherently racist, lots of people have that name, but to call a black guy doing their job that carries different implications even if you “didn’t mean it that way.”

So generally, there’s nothing wrong with the words “boy” or “son” most of the time, but when you address a black man this way, it carries a whole different implication. I’m not trying to condemn anyone morally or say “you’re evil if you’ve ever used these words about Lucio” or anything, but back to the beginning of this:

I am assuming you all have positive intent, that you are all well-meaning and that you are definitely not trying to be racist. Because of this, I feel like it’s my responsibility to tell you when a thing you’re saying carries meanings that you maybe didn’t consider and definitely didn’t mean to imply. I know I would feel foolish and guilty if I found out something I’d been saying casually actually had a racist meaning that I wasn’t aware of, so I just want to say that if anyone reading this is (like me) a white person who’s really truly well-intentioned and doesn’t mean to be racist at all, your response here should be “oh wow, I didn’t know that Boy and Son are names you generally shouldn’t call black people, I’ll be more conscious of that in the future,” and if your response is to become defensive and try to prove that it isn’t bad because you didn’t mean it “that way,” it either means you aren’t well-intentioned and do mean to be racist OR it means you didn’t read the post. 

That being said, I’m happy to inform where I can, but I’m also not black, and a lot of black writers have explained this a lot more eloquently than me. I suggest you do some googling and research what they’ve said on the subject, because I’m sure they’ll give you a clearer picture than I possibly can. 

[poppytheorist]

Sick of the Sun

The Wire, “Lessons”

I

“Sick of the Sun” is one of Poppy’s most personal songs. It’s also one of her prettiest. Like nearly all vocals these days, Poppy’s voice is adjusted in production, and sometimes quite heavily. This means that you’ll never hear a Poppy song with vocal blemishes, but sometimes the heavy adjustments smooth out all the “personality” in her voice. In “Sick of the Sun,” however, Poppy and co. hit a sweet spot; Poppy’s voice comes out sounding quite pleasant, beautiful, even, right up there with the choruses on “Fill the Crown.” It probably makes sense not to over-produce the vocals in SotS. After all, if you are producing a more “personal” song, you would want to preserve the distinct tone of the vocals to maximize its “authentic” sound.

“Sick of the Sun” (SotS) also features one of the cleanest and catchiest vocal melodies Poppy has ever written, right up there with the ones in “I Disagree.” I’m laying on the praise pretty thick here because, well, I kinda like the song. That being said, I would still like to share some criticisms of the song. Throughout I Disagree (album), we can see Poppy experimenting with different ways of closing out tracks (see: literally every song on the album). But in the case of SotS, there’s a really strange male-dominated vocal harmony right at the end of the song. Sure, there’s some harmonizing throughout the song, but this snippet really springs out of nowhere. Perhaps it was intended to serve as a transition to “Don’t Go Outside,” but instead it comes off as a little dissonant with the rest of SotS. Further, including someone else’s voice at the end slightly undercuts the song’s personal feel. Maybe this could have been avoided had this ending been retracted or altered. SotS clearly has a strong sense of “tiredness” or “fatigue” to it, so perhaps a prolonged ‘sigh’ out of Poppy would have been a more harmonious close to the track. A final ‘sigh’ would also serve as a better transition to “Don’t Go Outside” as it would situate Poppy at a “low-point” of sorts that she would then “rise out of” in DGO. I also think placing “Sit/Stay” right before SotS would be a good choice. “Bite Your Teeth” isn’t overly related to SotS, whereas “Sit/Stay” is. Both SotS and “Sit/Stay” explore some of Poppy’s personal frustrations; “Sit/Stay” does so in a loud, vehement way, whereas SotS does so in a quiet, reserved way. In a sense, both tracks are two sides of the same proverbial coin. Of course, swapping the order of songs on an album isn’t always simple; sometimes albums are put together in a very specific way for a reason. So, moving “Sit/Stay” begs the question of where “Bite Your Teeth” should go. I’m not sure about that one. I’ll have to try listening to the album in a couple different orders first. Plus, there’s always the chance I’ve missed something. In fact, I think it’s likely.

II

Now, it may seem strange for me to talk about SotS since, well, most people seem to have a pretty decent grasp as to what it’s about. Or, at least, that was my initial impression. Upon closer inspection, however, it appears that the predominant interpretation of SotS (AKA the one I found on Genius and want to yell about) is specious at best. Obviously, the Genius interpretations are written by different people who don’t necessarily agree on all the details, but there is a common thread throughout the site’s speculations: that fundamentally, SotS is about Poppy reflecting on a time when she dealt with depression. 

This view seems plausible at first, especially when considering lines such as “Everyone told me that it would get better/ But every day feels exactly the same.” Seems to fit well, yes? Well, it doesn’t. actually. I’d like to demonstrate just why the “depression” interpretation of SotS is not only inaccurate, but it’s also a logically nonsensical construal of the lyrics. Quite a claim, but I’ll explain. Before I do so, though, I’d like to get my disclaimers out of the way. By no means do I seek to diminish the importance of mental health, nor do I seek to undermine the experiences of those who’ve grappled with problems to theirs. My thoughts on our modern mental health epidemic are complicated, and probably not-too-coherent either, though I’m sympathetic to more postmodern claims that it’s really weird to simply treat people with mental health problems as though their brains are just “not working right,” especially without asking why? What caused them to be this way? and further, that holy shit there is a lot of vested interest on the half of [various others] to not examine the many root causes of our mental health predicament. Plus, what does it mean for someone’s brain to be “not working right”? According to whom? For what? And I’m just scratching the surface. Merely hinting at the surface, in fact. But of course, that’s another, far scarier, discussion, so I’ll just say: as someone who hasn’t exactly had pristine mental health: yeah, depression et al. fucking suck.  And so, I’ll definitely admit that depression does seem to be a common motif in music these days, it’s just not a common motif in Poppy’s, and so it’s probably not in SotS either. Now, my reasons why this is:

First, it seems rather strange to declare that SotS is about “depression” given the fact that Poppy has never talked about experiencing any form of mental “illness.” No, seriously. Now before the non-intentionalists write a hit-piece, I’m merely pointing out it’s a little inappropriate to diagnose a former-pop-star with depression (through her music, no less!), especially when she has never even talked about it. But this does beg the question: how’d we get to thinking SotS is about depression? Well:

Second, it appears that the depression interpretation is based on a fundamental misunderstanding of the tone of SotS. Listen to the song again. Is this what “depression” sounds like? Surely the tone is a little down-beat, but it’s not that down-beat. Tired, perhaps. Fatigued, even, but surely not depressed. Maybe a tinge of sadness is present, but the song is saturated with instrumentals that give it a very light and dreamy feel. Psychedelic, even. Wispy. Distant, especially. All these words I would use to describe the sound of SotS, but “depression” I would not. 

Third, and perhaps most damning, is that the depression interpretation is completely nonsensical. This isn’t merely a cheap-shot or a jab—I mean that the depression interpretation is actually logically incoherent. Look, everyone can agree that Poppy’s lyrics (and videos, etc.) tend to be on the cryptic side. Thus, your first impression of what a song or any other work of hers is about may be wrong. In fact, it may be likely. See, for example, “Me Laughing.” Further, it seems that a lot of the “interpretations” you find on Genius tend to be on the shallower side, AKA, they tend to be “first impressions” that aren’t thought through all that well. Not to say Genius contains nothing of value, because it may, but the explanations it gives are usually quick answers so people scratching their heads at lyrics can quickly look and say “yep, good enough!” And this leads to, among other things, mistakes. Some of which are bad, even.

Let’s take an example. The eight-line chorus of SotS is as follows:

I'm sick of the sun

It burns everyone

I want it to go away

I just wanna float away

I'm sick of the sun

Can't trust anyone

I want it to go away

I just wanna float away

Cool, so that’s what we’re looking at. Now, the Genius interpretation of the chorus reads as follows:

Whilst this can be interpreted in several ways, these lyrics can be perceived to be Poppy / Moriah’s struggles with depression. Clinical depression, a common mental illness, is often accompanied by self-isolation: people often don’t have the energy to leave their house.

The sun is often a metaphor for hope and the fact that Poppy is sick of it indicates the presence of despair. “I want it to go away” can be seen as a desperate plea of a woman against her mental illness. She wants to be rid of it.

The final line can be seen as even darker. Whilst “floating way” brings about gentle, sweet connotations, in this context it can indicate death or perhaps even suicide, e.g. the spirit floating away from the body, floating away from reality.

The distrust present in these lyrics may also refer back to Poppy’s self-isolation. She feels as if she can no longer connect with anyone.

Source

Emphasis mine. Okay, I don’t wish any personal harm on the author of this explanation, or the twenty-five people who upvoted it, but my god, this is an absolute trainwreck. To show why this is so terrible, we’ll look at the bolded section closely:

“The sun is often a metaphor for hope”

Okay, sure.

“and the fact that Poppy is sick of it indicates the presence of despair.”

Not really. Despair indicates a lack of hope, not a disdain of hope. But I’m being a little pedantic. The real problem comes next:

““I want it to go away” can be seen as a desperate plea of a woman against her mental illness.”

Did you catch that? The word “it” has completely forgotten what it was referring to. It’s downright lost its referent. As a reminder, the chorus reads like:

I'm sick of the sun

It burns everyone

I want it to go away

so when Poppy says “I want it to go away,” she means “I want [the sun] to go away,” not “I want [my depression] to go away,” as this person would have us believe. Besides, it was just established that the “sun” was a metaphor for “hope.” So how could someone wanting “hope” to “go away” possibly be “a desperate plea of a woman against her mental illness”? Wouldn’t a “desperate plea against … mental illness” be seeking “hope” and not wishing it away?

Look, I’m not saying the song can’t be about depression, it’s just that all the explanations we have, including the one above, that support this idea are truly awful. I think we should have much more evidence before we recklessly go about diagnosing people with mental conditions by listening to their songs.

Fourth, as alluded to, the view that SotS is about depression fails to account for several important lines in the song. Interestingly, these lines seem contradictory to the idea that the song is about depression. For one, our [G]enius interpreter completely ignored the line “It burns everyone.” Probably because this line doesn’t fit neatly into the interpretation of “the sun” representing “hope.” After all, it’s not clear that “[hope] burns everyone.” In fact, it seems like nonsense. Plus, we’re not sure how the line “Can’t trust anyone” fits with Poppy’s alleged depressive episode. Huh, I wasn’t aware that paranoia was a key feature of depression. Guess we’ve got some news to break to the tin-hatters. Further, if SotS is about depression, then what’s with all the talk about Poppy needing to “find the right sound”? Even Genius appears to give up connecting this to depression. It seems that either a) these four lines don’t connect with the meaning of the song and Poppy was mistaken to include them, or b) SotS isn’t about depression. I’ll opt for the latter. Look, I’ve been railing a little hard here, so I’ll say that it’s fine if your interpretations miss a few bits (as mine usually do). Just know that leaving about important pieces of information, especially pieces that fly directly in the face of your interpretation, means you’re no longer interpreting [the piece], but instead you’re interpreting a conveniently-warped-caricature-of [the piece]. By doing this, you’re no longer engaging with the piece on its terms, but your own. You’re not attempting to “discover” the meaning of the work, instead you are projecting on your own and throwing out the bits that don’t conform. At the risk of angering [a lot of people], I find it a tad unhealthy to treat artworks merely as devices to either a) confirm what you already “know” or b) be thrown out for being “wrong.” As an olive branch, perhaps “some'' projection is inevitable, but we can at least admit degrees. And an even bigger olive branch: I used to do a) a lot (and still somewhat do).

Fifth, I’m deeply suspicious of the modern instinctual association of “sadness” with “depression” and “solitude” with “something is wrong with you.” Who taught us to do this? Where did these associations come from? Most worrying: who/what wants us to think this way? This may seem contradictory to what I said before. No. Yes. I don’t know. I haven’t written about mental health, and I don’t think I can. So with that, let’s move on.

Regardless of whether you find all five of my complaints tenable, hopefully they were enough to convince you that this idea of SotS being “about Poppy’s past depression” needs to be buried. Preferably six feet deep.

III

Okay, so if SotS isn’t about “depression,” then what is it about? Well, let’s take a look at some of the lyrics. The song opens with the refrain, headed by the line “I’m sick of the sun.” We may ask: what is Poppy referring to as “the sun”? Does she mean this literally, as in, she is tired of the warm glowy ball of fire in the sky? Or is she talking about something else here? It seems that this analogy is a central part of the piece. By this, I mean that this analogy recurs throughout and is deeply embedded in the song. Hence, one’s answer to the above questions will influence the rest of the song’s meaning. Knowing this, perhaps we should look at some of the other lines before we take a guess.

Immediately following “I’m sick of the sun” comes the line “it burns everyone.” Hm. The literal sun is rather hot, but does it really burn “everyone”? I don’t think so. Plenty of people go their lives without sunburns, or simply minor ones. It also doesn’t seem like the literal interpretation of “sun” here would explain the inevitability of being “burned” that this line seems to suggest. Indeed, the next two lines (“I want it to go away/ I just wanna float away”) point towards Poppy dealing with some sort of personal trouble, rather than her disdain of fiery yellow dwarves (I feel like there’s a joke there). This notion of personal trouble is also supported by the other line in the refrain, “Can’t trust anyone.” Okay, perhaps we can do away with the literal interpretation of “the sun,” but then what is Poppy speaking of?

We turn now to the verse. SotS has only one, eight lines in total. Typically, the verses in a song are enough to tell listeners what exactly is going on, but a cursory glance at this lonely verse casts doubt upon its explanatory capability. It doesn’t even appear that the verse covers all that much ground, so to speak. Are we then stuck in the dark, or is this single set of lines really enough for us to ascribe some coherent meaning to the song? Well, yes, actually (ambiguity intended). Close inspection reveals that the verse contains plenty of information—more than enough to guide us through the rest of the song.

Let’s proceed in true analytic fashion by breaking the verse down into two sections, each four lines in length. This break isn’t simply for the sake of symmetry, but is instead based on subject matter. The first four lines of the verse (“Can someone turn the lights down?/ … / Someone turn the lights out, oh”) pertain to Poppy’s aversion to “lights” whereas the subsequent four lines (“I need to find the right sound/ … / [ditto]”) pertain to Poppy’s struggle to find her right “sound.” I’m slightly trivializing this difference, but as we shall see, the distinction is not merely formal. 

The first part of the verse, the “lights” bloc, contains several key bits of information. As noted above, these four lines are concerned with “lights” of some sort. But what do “lights” have to do with our central analogy pertaining to “the sun”? Well, “the sun” is clearly a type of light. A very bright one, in fact. It may even be that “the sun” serves as simply an amalgamation of the “lights” mentioned here. I suppose this would hold true literally if you’d like to consider the sun a collection of nuclear reactions, but, science aside, there does seem to be a more metaphorical marriage of “lights” with “the sun” from the words “‘cause it’s too bright.” Here “it’s” does a lot of work; the tinge of vagueness serves to connect the prior two lines, which contain requests for someone to “turn the lights down” or “shut [them] out,” with “the sun,” by saying that “it’s too bright.” Now how does Poppy respond to “the lights”? Well, she says: “I close my eyes.” Note that closing one’s eyes alleviates the pain from bright lights, similar to how one does after waking up and looking outside on a sunny day, but it also leaves one blind, temporarily unable to take in any outside information.

Present also in the “lights” bloc are requests for “someone.” “Someone” to somehow deal with these “lights,” either by turning them down, shutting them out, or simply turning them out. Who, exactly, is to be this “someone”? Well, perhaps nobody, and it’s possible that Poppy’s almost disinterested tone here shows she is aware of this. This may be some sort of acknowledged bystander effect: nobody is actually going to deal with these “lights”—maybe nobody can. Notice there is also a shift in the intensity of Poppy’s requests to this “someone.” She starts asking for “someone” to “turn the lights down,” then asks for “someone” to “shut the lights out,” before finally asking for “someone” to “turn the lights out” altogether. Maybe Poppy is finding herself increasingly ‘fed up’ with “the lights” over time, or that “the lights” are becoming increasingly disruptive to her. But disruptive how? Indeed:

The final tidbit from the “lights” bloc is that Poppy mentions “the lights” are “too bright”? But “too bright” for what? We’ve already agreed we’re not being literal here, meaning this isn’t a simple case of caring for one’s retinas, so why are these “lights” such a problem? Well, perhaps the next part of the verse can provide an answer.

The next section of the only verse may be called the “sound” bloc for convenience. The first and last line (fifth and eighth in the whole verse), “I need to find the right sound,” tells us about the nature of Poppy’s troubles in SotS. As many know, Poppy has recently been changing up her “sound,” notably from pop to [something media outlets struggle to characterize]. It’s interesting that Poppy mentions she still hasn’t “found” “the right sound,” even after switching up her style. Perhaps more surprises are to come. Or, perhaps, she is referring to past struggles. Either way, in the next line she wishes for her “right sound” to be “Something [she] can say that [she] found.” The struggle for individuality is a common motif in Poppy’s work, in both her past work and present. It seems that even after changing her sound to something more true to herself, she found that her personal struggle to distinguish herself from others (or remain true to herself) persists. The next line, “Yeah, I can hear it in my mind” tells us that Poppy has some conception of the “right sound” for herself, but it’s on the tip of her tongue, so to speak. Combined with the repetition of “I need to find the right sound” at the end of this bloc, we’re given some sense of the difficulty, perhaps even impossibility (not futility, though) of doing so. It could be that this “right sound” is something that constantly eludes Poppy. After all, “the right sound” probably changes as she does, which would make actually “finding” it rather tough.

The common thread through the “sound” bloc is Poppy’s artistic struggle. Her struggle to produce something that is original yet remains true to herself. Plus, whatever “sound” she produces needs to be something people want to hear. No small feat. Thus, we find an answer to our previous question (“too bright” for what?): it seems that “the lights” and perhaps “the sun” are interfering with Poppy’s creative process and are hampering her pursuit of individuality she strives to achieve through her work.

The only other set of lines (the bridge, apparently) that differs from the chorus is as follows:

Everyone told me that it would get better

But every day feels exactly the same

As previously mentioned, this set of lines does lend itself particularly well to the depression account, but it may just as easily be thought of referencing Poppy’s difficulties finding a “sound” that is both true to herself, original, and something people actually want to hear. However, there is also a tie-in to Poppy’s previous attempts to rid herself of “the lights” or “the sun.” Meaning: something’s still missing here. As such, it seems that providing an explanation of the song’s central analogy (what is “the sun” referring to?) is now necessary, but, since we have looked through the song in detail, providing such an explanation is also now possible.

IV

We’re left with a final riddle of sorts: what “burns everyone,” causes distrust (“Can’t trust anyone”), pervades, persists, and interferes with one’s creative process that Poppy wishes to untether herself from (“I just wanna float away”)? Indeed, what is “the sun” here?

The previous and seemingly common answer was “depression,” but as we demonstrated, this explanation is rather lackluster. Thus, I would like to offer my own: “the sun” is an analogy for “the Spotlight,” the ever-present gaze of fans, friends, and foes on the life of the famous. How does this new explanation fare? Can it help us ‘tie things up?’ Let’s test it out and see:

Suppose that when Poppy says she is “sick of the sun,” she means she is “sick of the [Spotlight].” She is tired of always being watched and always being scrutinized (“I want it to go away”) and she wishes to unplug or untether herself from The Game all famous artists play (“I just wanna float away”) because it causes her stress or strife (“It burns everyone”) and she finds it has corrupted some (or nearly all) of the other players (“Can’t trust anyone”). In fact, she finds that the Spotlight interferes with her own personal quest to create work that remains both true to herself and original (“Can someone turn the lights down?/ … / I need to find the right sound”). Unfortunately, it appears that life in the Spotlight is not something that will simply “get better” on its own (“But every day feels exactly the same”). Sometimes, just to manage, Poppy finds the need to disconnect for a while (“I close my eyes, ‘cause it’s too bright”).

Hey, that’s not too bad. I’d even go so far as to say it’s a little “better.” Indeed, the “depression” account, which, honestly, doesn’t account for much, relies heavily on just a couple lines and plenty of armchair psychology, whereas the “Spotlight” interpretation offers a far more “decentralized” explanation of SotS. Plus, the “Spotlight” account views SotS as consistent with much of Poppy’s previous work and with external information about both her recent change of sound and her frustrations working within the competitive and conformist music industry; the “depression” account treats SotS as Poppy’s offshoot confessional on her mental health, something that she has seemingly never acknowledged elsewhere.

Look, I’m not advocating writing an essay every time you hear a song you like. I’m also not saying you ‘must’ see things the way I do. After all, “meaning” doesn’t come out of thin air—we are the ones who put it [everywhere]. So, fundamentally, all I can do is make an argument. I just want to show that we can [interpret/analyze/evaluate/whatever] “better” than we currently are. I know we can. Hell, I’ve even seen it done. That’s why I’m so tired of Genius’s “explanations” of songs explaining away all the genius. I guess you could say I’m “sick” of them.

...

...

...

*Sigh*

[mild-lunacy]

LGBT Romance Gender Roles and the female gaze

Since I'm on a paranormal romance kick (Nalini Singh is only the tip of the iceberg), it's become clear to me just why I prefer LGBT romance in many ways. Why my current fixation is temporary, and I'll come back to slash, BL manga, and/or gay romance in the end. Basically, male characters are important to me, and I've gotten spoiled in the way they're so much more real in a gay romance or slash fanfic, even with all the romanticizing that goes on. One example is the internal dialogue you typically get in a male POV attraction to a woman as opposed to another man. You'd think there would be a variety, and there is, but there's also a lot of consistency in theme, and certainly common elements. In paranormal or contemporary romance, the heterosexual man mainly shows his sexual attraction to the woman two ways: he wants to touch her to please her and make her happy, or he wants to touch her to claim or 'own' her body, exert his dominance. These motivations would also exist in a gay male character in LGBT romance fiction, but there's a strong current of attraction meaning he himself wants to be touched. For his own sake. For its own sake.

It seems almost too simple, but I've read a whole lot of contemporary and paranormal romance at this point, and I can't recall the last time there was anything that genuinely focused on male desire that wasn't implicitly filtered through the woman's needs and desires, even just a wanking session, for example. Simply focusing on the male perspective certainly happens, though it's not as common as it could be. That's when you already have a book with the male love interest's POV. But yeah, depiction of internal desire to the point of masturbation, say, isn't such a high bar. What's different in LGBT romance novels is the content and framing of any fantasy or reference to male desire. In a queer male character, you'd often get fantasies about being touched, being desired or perceived as an object of lust, even if it's a top or alpha character of the same sort as the typical het romance hero. He's allowed these fantasies and desires in LGBT fiction. His body is an object of exploration as much as his partner's. In heterosexual romance, the man relentlessly sees the woman as the object, while the woman's object of desire is him. However, the text's treatment of desire is inevitably different.

The 'progressive' or modern aspect is that the woman also lusts after and objectifies the man's body, normally. The thing is that no matter how much the text also objectifies the male body in relation to the woman (which seems like progress), the female gaze ultimately becomes as limiting and oppressive as the male version. What I'm ultimately arguing about is the same thing that the male gaze used to do to female desire in male-written romance.

In a paranormal or contemporary romance, almost every time, there's a sense that the woman is doing the man a favor by giving him oral sex in the books I've read, for example. This is even when the female character is super excited and enthusiastic. My point is that there's a textual awareness that she didn't have to, and it's a bonus. Meanwhile, the man's desire to happily offer her oral satisfaction is presented contextually as a sign of what a man should be. This is explicitly presented as being what makes him sexy: this fixation on pleasing her, this knowledge how to treat her body right. Conversely, in a gay relationship, it's simply that both people are great at sucking each other off and are dying to both give and receive. The pleasure is simply shown to be mutual and there's no sense of one having to be grateful or needing a reward. And further, it's okay for either man to just want to be serviced, whereas in a heterosexual narrative, that's only okay for the woman. If a man gets serviced and is happy with it without always needing to reciprocate, usually it's a sign there's something wrong with the character or the relationship (or both). Needless to say, it's perfectly fine and healthy for the woman to just be happy being sexually serviced, and indeed this is often described as what makes a good man happiest.

It's weird to fixate on how I feel like gay romances have more enjoyable dynamics for me because of the men's increased selfishness, but it's really true. To me, it's ultimately about a male character being more genuine and having a believable interiority rather than selfishness, of course. I don't actually think of it as selfishness, and it's certainly not generally portrayed that way in a gay romance. It's just the natural course of desire. It's simply that in a heterosexual romance, the natural attitude would be portrayed as selfishness, or understood as the attitude of an immature man or a womanizer who hasn't been broken in yet. The same man who's being passionate (or at least hormonal) in a gay romance would suddenly be a bad lover-- or worse, not manly or alpha enough-- in a straight one.

In the end, I suppose it comes down to gender roles and dynamics. Not surprising. Taken in non-sexual contexts, plenty of heterosexual romances seem organic and believable as well as desirable to me, as plenty of writers consciously resist gender roles, at least for women. Certainly the female authors I often read. This seems to become complicated once female bodies are sexualized. Once you introduce a sexual component... suddenly the treatment of women feels like a trap. I feel like I'm supposed to feel good that this super cool man is only dying to please and possess the woman he loves, but I just... I feel so tired of the way vulnerability is only ever emotional. The man is plenty vulnerable to the woman he's in love with in a romance, generally, but his body is in control 95% of the time. Because that's how he proves his devotion. By holding back and controlling his strength and putting her sexual needs first even if it near kills him. And ultimately, I just think it's suffocating and it gets boring to me in the end. I do think that sort of alpha behavior is also relatively common in LGBT romance, but it's not as loaded when there's no sense of expectation implicitly based on gender.

Sometimes there's less of the alpha crap than others, particularly with a well-written male POV, of course. There's certainly plenty of pining and loving descriptions of endless hard-ons out there, to say the least. But a queer man may fantasize about a lover's helping hand or willing mouth, may actually dwell purely in his body without holding back or thinking of the other person. A queer man, in other words, may actually act like a normal man. A straight man must act like a woman's fantasy of a man to be romantically/sexually attractive. This is true even though a lot of women write LGBT romance, to the point of it possibly being mostly women, for the simple reason that women generally predominate within romance writing.

Anyway, to be fair, I did read about a woman giving her lover a handjob and he came while she didn't... although this was just the once, and he may be excused because he literally hadn't had sex for a thousand years at that point. Would he fantasize about that scenario, though? In a gay romance, he would. Of course he would. He'd have wanked himself raw and we would know it. Sometimes, again, het romance would go that far-- the straight guy aches and pines and it's sexual-- but he wouldn't be masturbating over his own satisfaction. He's too much of a fantasy for that. And ultimately, that's not enough for me by far, not after I've experienced actual believable male characters. The way male leads in heterosexual romance explicitly perform masculinity for the female gaze is just tiring to me.

[utopianparadoxist]

2. The Neverending Story -  Muse/Lord & The rules of Paradox Space

[Spoilers for The Neverending Story]

I’m not the first to note Homestuck’s references to AURYN, the magical amulet from The Neverending Story. The symbol of the intertwined black and white snakes is directly referenced only twice in Homestuck’s story, and both times it tells us a mind-boggling amount about the nature and function of Homestuck’s universe. 

And even that only scratches the surface. So instead of starting off with Homestuck itself, let me tell you a little bit about The Neverending Story itself.

The Neverending Story is a book split in two. In the most commonly printed version, it comes in Red and Green text halves. The real world, the realm of humans where you and I live--those sections are printed in Red. Fantastica, the world of fiction and stories and all things imaginary, is printed in green.

And as with two sections, The Neverending Story is split into two central figures:

The Childlike Empress, and Bastian Balthazar Bux.

Muse & Lord

In the green-lettered plains of Fantastica, The Childlike Empress rules over all. Although her authority is accepted by even the most evil and mostrous in Fantastica, she never gives orders. Even so, she is both eternal and eternally childlike. Good and evil are equal in her eyes. 

Sometimes called the Golden-Eyed Commander of Wishes, The Childlike Empress’ authority only manifests when she grants her gem of wish-fulfilling powers--AURYN--to another. This other is treated as though the Empress herself were present, and acts as an emmisary for her.

She is the embodiment of Fantasy itself, inspiring others to act out her will. She is a question, a mystery, a wonder. She is, in short...A Muse. 

And she has a direct parallel in Calliope, who similarly draws no distinction between good and evil (people forget that she read what was likely the worst of Vriska without being exposed to her growth, and seemingly wanted to be friends with her anyway)...

And who similarly has absolute power over reality, yet never gives orders, even as the entire narrative is shaped around her. Just as with the Childlike Empress, without Calliope’s existence, none of the other characters in the comic can exist either. 

Everyone is entangled in and created by Lord English’s Alpha Timeline, but that web is Calliope’s as well, and she’s causally entangled in the creation of all four of the universes we follow. 

And again like the Childlike Empress, Calliope who bestows her Symbol on others, granting AURYN to humans--an emblem which endows in the wearer the ability to make any wish come true. 

Hell, Calliope even seems not to grow up normally in Act 7 and [S] Credits. A Childlike Empress indeed. And as for her counterpart? Bastian may not be as much of a jerk as Caliborn, but the parallels between them are even more explicit:

Where The Childlike Empress is a Muse only by implication, Bastian is textually and demonstrably a Lord. 

But let’s back up a bit.

Bastian Balthazar Bux is a little boy who steals a book named “The Neverending Story” from a bookshop and hides in his school to read it in one sitting. His sections, those taking place in the Human world, typically feature text colored Red.

However, around the halfway point of The Neverending Story, he realizes that the story is not only aware of him, but calling out to him. And he eventually finds himself pulled into the realm of Fantastica. 

Bastian is a human, you see, and only humans can create stories--the inhabitants of Fantastica themselves cannot. And once the Childlike Empress is reborn with a new name, Fantastica must be reborn as well. So The Childlike Empress meets Bastian in the void between the two realms of Fantastica, and gives him the amulet AURYN, the symbol of her power. 

And so, she entrusts him with a quest: To fulfill his wishes in Fantastica, and re-create the realm of Fantasy as he goes.

Incidentally, receiving AURYN also changes Bastian’s race. Bastian is explicitly white, but upon arriving in Fantastica transforms into “a young prince from the Orient”. I’m not sure why that even happens, to be honest? Let’s note that this book is from, like, 1979 and definitely not perfect.

Anyway, I only mention it because this lends some credence to my assertion that Trickster Mode’s whiteness is not at all tied to the “actual race” of the kids-- since whatever that race is, changing it would be within AURYN’s power.

To be honest, I should’ve noted that was explicit earlier, since Homestuck all but explicitly states that Tricksterfied Cherubs would look like Lil Cal, which definitely entails a primary skin color swap. And there, as with Humans, the transformation always renders the subject Caucasian-looking.

Now, where were we?

Ah, right. So, the first thing you might notice is that Bastian’s ascent to Lordship also coincides with him leaving the World of Men and entering the World of Fantasy/Ideas. 

Which strikes his first echo with Caliborn. Both characters’ entries into power are marked by changing their text color to Green--the color of their respective Muse figures. And like Calliope dies for Caliborn to Enter, The Childlike Empress disappears from Fantastica as soon as Bastian becomes it’s Lord. 

Bastian spends most of his adventure in the realm seeking to meet her once more, on some level--just as Lord English spends an eternity in the Void, trying to find and destroy the Calliopes.

And during his search, Bastian also accrues subjects and followers who carry out his will. Bastian is adored for his ability to create stories--which instantly become Real-- across Fantastica. With The Childlike Empress’ AURYN around his neck, nothing can resist his will. Bastian becomes, for all intents and purposes, a God. 

Although he loses his humanity little by little with every wish he makes. The memory of being weak, the memory of being ugly, the memory of being scared-- as Bastian travels, he grows more self-satisfied and arrogant, desiring the adoration of others without true regard for their feelings and hearts. 

Until in the end, he’s exploiting those he calls friends through sheer force of will. At this point, Bastian seeks to replace The Childlike Empress entirely, attempting to become the Childlike Emperor--just as Lord English seeks to emulate Calliope through a multitude of stylistic choices in his personal aesthetic. 

I think banditAffiliate puts it well in this forum post:

“Doc Scratch was born to serve as Lord English's other half, replacing the role Calliope served when the two shared one body. From Caliborn's warped perspective, the two share many similarities. They're both wordy, intelligent, and (as Caliborn saw her) quite smug. He scrapbooks with a ~ATH book like she did, and carries her weapon. In addition to being a pastiche of his sister, Scratch is also a symbol of his other weakness, the cue ball. Both are heralded to be the key to his defeat, after all. He does double duty then by killing Scratch, hatching out of his body and growing more powerful (by assimilating Scratch's first guardian powers), "predominating" over him and asserting his dominance over both his vulnerabilities once again.”

And Bastian, well...

Sound familiar at all? 

By the end, Bastian is at risk of becoming what is essentially a Yaldabaoth--an arrogant God with full dominion over his material reality, but blind to the world of ideas outside of him. 

Luckily, Bastian escapes this fate, and goes on to live a happy life, becoming a world-renowed storyteller. His path is not the path of the Lord forever. But that is another story, and shall be told another time. 

There’s one last thing to note about AURYN, because it appears in two places in Homestuck. There’s the Lollipop, yes--and by linking AURYN to the Cherubs, we learn a great deal about both Muse and Lord, Calliope and Caliborn.

But AURYN’s impact is a bit more far-reaching than just them. 

The emblem is also depicted during the mating ritual of Cherubs, remember? And it’s important to view this image in context, because as Aranea tells us...

Mating Cherubs tap into the forces of power presiding over all that is eternal. Cherubs are linked to the primordial forces of reality by their nature. The source of Cherub’s powers is their intrinsic connection to the flow and nature of reality. Which suggests that the principle that AURYN is inscribed with, the principle that guides the power of its magic, is also the fundamental principle of Homestuck’s universe. Cherubs are simply beings with a unique ability to tap directly into it. And that principle is...

“Do As You Will.”

Nothing in Homestuck’s reality happens except by the Will of someone living inside it. Individual will is the backbone of all events and objects, all circumstances and beings, all people and universes in Homestuck. In Homestuck, everybody always gets what they want--one way or another. That is what AURYN-- placed here, at the center of the forces of creation and destruction-- suggests. A good example of this is Lord English’s creation, where Caliborn and Gamzee’s wills to become Lord English meet Arquis’ desire to have a heroic moment of unfathomable impact onto reality:

Thus resulting in a scenario that fulfills all of their desires, and results in the creation of Lord English and Doc Scratch:

I’m not going to list a bunch of other examples because this kind of stuff is literally always what happens in Homestuck. The only thing that trumps a person’s desires in Homestuck is the desires of another willing to undermine or exploit the former.

And that kind of authoritarian behavior is the closest thing to “Sin” Homestuck’s setting has. It always comes with consequences. This is also why Karma exists in Homestuck’s causality, as noted by Latula. This is what the cycle of revenge was about. 

Not even killing someone can truly erase the impact of their will on reality in Homestuck’s universe, and usurping or denying others their wills always comes with a whiplash effect back on yourself. So what does that mean for Lord English, who has so thoroughly usurped and denied the wills of every other member of the cast?

Well that... is another story, and shall be told another time. 

Next time, we’ll talk about the Mother franchise’s two later installments: Mother 3, and Earthbound. There’s much to discuss. Perhaps we’ll even find an echo of Lord English’s karmic punishment there?

Ah well. That’s all for now. 

I hope you’ll check in next time.

[Master Post]

[Patreon] [Hiveswap Discord]

Keep rising.

[gcintheme-blog]

Debunking Serano’s “Debunking”

Julia Serano believes he has “debunked” radical feminists in this article published on his blog yesterday. I would like to take some time to deconstruct Serano’s arguments and debunk trans activism’s “debunking.” Because of all the fallacies and straw men in the article, this post will be a long one. Grab a snack and join me. Serano, this is rhetorically addressed to you.

Your second sentence in this article:

From pre-interview conversations we shared, I knew that my interviewer planned to ask me about Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s comments from earlier this year wherein she claimed that trans women are not women.

And in the article you link to for a source:

Adichie, who is not transgender, responded: “So when people talk about, you know, ‘Are trans women women?’ — my feeling is trans women are trans women.”

Notice how you’re dishonest in the second sentence of this article? You begin by touting yourself and your interview for the New York Times, and then immediately, falsely, cast skeptical feminists like Adichie as the villains. While I wouldn’t disagree with Adichie if she had said trans women aren’t women, she didn’t say that and you begin your piece by framing “popular” feminists (Adichie and women like her) as a natural enemy.

Moving on, you talk about your own book for a while, and then:

Women who insist that trans women are not women often object to being called “cis women” under the false assumption that it somehow undermines their femaleness — this is not at all the purpose of this language....In other words, referring to someone as “cisgender” simply means that they have not had a transgender experience.

You do not get to determine other people's analysis of your writing, especially if you want to falsely put words in Adichie's mouth. If you are going to claim that trans feelings are what matter over other people speaking, then you cannot simultaneously tell anyone who feels undermined by putting a prefix on our oppression that we are wrong.

I could say "In other words, referring to someone as 'he' simply means he was born with a penis and has been treated accordingly by society" and you'd call me a bigot. You cannot support, for instance, the idea that misgendering a trans person is violence if the alleged offender meant no harm because according to your logic, the intent of words matters more than the effect.

How many times have women heard men tell us not to take their words negatively? “Calm down!” “Relax!” “It’s a compliment!” This is tired.

While some cisgender people refuse to take our experiences seriously, the fact of the matter is that transgender people can be found in virtually every culture and throughout history.

This is not an argument. Sexism has occurred in virtually every culture and throughout history. So has rape, murder, and child abuse. Longevity is not relevant. You cannot argue that it lends legitimacy or validates your claims.

While cis feminists who claim that trans women are not women obsess over questions of identity (“How can a ‘man’ possibly call ‘himself’ a woman?”), they purposefully overlook or play down the fact that we have very real life experiences as women.

Actually, we don't obsess over your identity. You do. Radical feminists are focused on material problems whereas you are the one constantly blowing about identity validation. I have never asked how a man can call himself a woman because society allows men to call themselves anything they want, including the biologically impossible.

You do not have experiences as a woman. You have experiences as a man masquerading as a woman. They will never be the same as our experiences.

Forcing trans women into a separate group that is distinct from cis women does not in any way help achieve feminism’s central goal of ending sexism.

Spaces free from men does help our goal by allowing us to organize women like you to come and tell us who we are and what our goals should be. Men forcing themselves into women's spaces is sexism.

Other common appeals to biology center on reproduction — e.g., stating that trans women have not experienced menstruation, or cannot become pregnant. This ignores the fact that some cisgender women never menstruate and/or are unable to become pregnant.

A man has never become pregnant. Where are women who do not menstruate or are unable to become pregnant complaining like you are? I have never become pregnant and never once did I doubt that I'm a woman. Society has treated me from birth as a female with the potential to become pregnant. You do not have that potential.

Women’s genitals vary greatly, and as with chromosomes and reproductive capabilities, we cannot readily see other people’s genitals in everyday encounters.

Women do not have penises. Diversity in vulvas and vaginas is not a penis. We can evaluate the sex of 99% of the people we come across at first glance. I PROMISE you that men know I have a vagina when they sexually harass me on the street even though they can't see it.

When I lived in Spain as an Iraqi girl, I was sometimes mistaken for a person of Romani heritage and treated as such. (One specific incident comes to mind where I was patiently waiting to use a cash machine and the current user tried to shoo me away, believing I would try to rob her.) While my phenotype might appear to be that of a Roma girl to some people and I have had “real experiences” of being an Iraqi mistaken for a Roma person, that doesn’t make me Romani. It doesn’t give me the history of the Romani people or the struggle of their daily lives and common discrimination.

And frankly, what could possibly be more sexist than reducing a woman to what’s between her legs? Isn’t that precisely what sexist men have been doing to women for centuries on end?

Possibly the idea that a woman is a collection of stereotypes rather than a biologically oppressed class? Acknowledging I have a vagina and my life has been a certain way because of it is not reductive. I never said it defines me; it makes my life significantly different from yours and as a radical feminist I am trying to fight against that. You're the only one using that argument.

So it is hypocritical for any self-identified feminist to use “biology” and “body parts” arguments in their attempts to dismiss trans women.

Biology is directly tied to our oppression. We need to point that out to fight the oppression. Is it a black person playing into racism by pointing out that she is black? Is a Jew hypocritical for pointing out that antisemitism happens to her because she is Jewish? During the Holocaust, people with Jewish heritage who self-identified as atheists were STILL murdered along with practicing Jews. They couldn't identify themselves out of the ghettos or the concentration camps because your identifarianism is made up.

The main thrust of this assertion is that women are women because of socialization and/or their experiences with sexism. But what about me then?

It's NOT ALWAYS ABOUT YOU.

You're not a woman. There is your answer.

Or what about young trans girls who socially transition early in life, and who never have the experience of being perceived or treated as a man?

Socialization literally starts in the uterus. There are cultures with superstitions that doing certain things will "curse" a pregnant woman with a female infant. I can see you don't spend a lot of time with children (alhamdulillah--thank god) because you would see how early that socialization begins and reflects in their behavior. I’ve already written about how society disadvantages female infants.

A young girl is forced against her will to live as a boy. Upon reaching adulthood, after years of male socialization and privilege, she comes out about identifying as female and begins to live as a woman. Do you accept her as a woman?

Children are not forced against their will to live as their biological sex because biological sex is natural trait for human beings . Children are forced to conform to gender roles but your insistence that womanhood is just a collection of those roles is actually upholding the problem.

Saying "you are a boy" is not the same as being told what “boy” socially entails, or that you cannot do feminine-labeled things because you are a boy. You were NEVER a young girl so don't act like a victim in that sense. I'm sorry society forces children to uphold gender roles but radical feminists are the ones out here fighting them.

More often than not, people who claim that trans women aren’t women make both the biology and socialization arguments simultaneously, even though they are seemingly contradictory (i.e., if biology is the predominant criteria, then one’s socialization shouldn’t matter, and vice versa).

Biology is the basis of that socialization. Radical feminists are not arguing conflicting ideologies. We acknowledge that socialization is assigned to us based on our material and unchangeable biological sex. This is not contradictory in any way.

Much like their homophobic counterparts who make appeals to biology (“God made Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve”)

Creationism is not biology. You're trying to undermine biology and evolution with an example that you know is religious and not scientific at all.

The trans-women-aren’t-women crowd desperately throws the entire kitchen sink at us rather than attempting to make a coherent argument.

I think I've made a very coherent argument but trans activists ignore that argument and set up straw men, like you just did in the sentence immediately before this one. You're the one who has it wrong.

While gender socialization is quite real, all of us are capable of overcoming or transcending the socialization that we experienced as children.

So now you're acknowledging gender socialization but saying we can overcome it. This is blaming women for our own oppression because we cannot socialize or identify ourselves out of it. Even trans men cannot escape their socialization and the attacks against their female biology like anti-abortion laws.

If I could transcend my socialization, I wouldn't wear makeup, but my job requires me to look "presentable" and this means wearing makeup in my society. If I could transcend my socialization, I would be much firmer with men who interrupt me but I know they will likely react with more hostility and I have to prioritize my safety over shedding stereotypes. It's hardly an option really.

The "Male Energy" and "Male Privilege" Fallacies

The way you've put "male privilege" in quotation marks and followed with the word "fallacies" makes me extremely nervous for this next section because it sounds like you don't believe male privilege exists. But I will read and judge fairly...

In my many years of being perceived by the world as a cisgender woman, I have never once had anyone claim to detect “male privilege” or “male energy” in me.

This is because your male socialization means you are more likely to react with hostility or violence when being criticized, and our female socialization makes us less likely to criticize men, out of fear or concern for your feelings over ours.

Do you think male-identified males have these conversations with women or with each other all the time? I have never told a man he exudes "male energy." I've never even heard of this. It's bizarre. It’s also unrealistic to believe people tell you every thought they have about you. I’m sure people have thought things about me—both flattering and unflattering—that they’ve kept to themselves.

Male privilege is a very real thing. In my booking Whipping Girl, I talk at length about my own personal experiences of having it, and subsequently losing it post-transition.

Why do you have male privilege in quotation marks in every previous line? It's very obvious you don't think it applies to you as you've stated this directly. That's the same line of thinking I've heard from most male self-identified "feminists" who really just want to deny their own culpability. We've all heard it.

The fact that the trans-women-aren’t-women crowd constantly harp about trans women’s real or imagined male privilege, yet refuse to acknowledge or examine their own cisgender privilege, demonstrates that their concerns about privilege are disingenuous.

"Trans women's real or imagined male privilege." So which is it then? You aren't putting forth a coherent argument.

Cisgender privilege is not real. Women are not privileged more than men in the world, and accepting the reality of your body and how it means you are treated in the world is not a privilege unless you argue that being transgender is a mental illness, in which case those without that mental illness do have some advantages. But the trans lobby takes offense to that.

There are numerous problems with this line of reasoning [that trans males are caricatures of women]:

1) It relies on a highly negative view of feminine gender expression (that I have debunked in my writings) and implies that conventionally feminine cisgender women are also behaving superficially and/or reinforcing stereotypes.

If you do believe that women are an oppressed group, then naturally if follows the oppressed group cannot be blamed for their participation in that system to the same extent as the oppressors.

I have been socialized from birth to act feminine according to my culture’s standards. You haven’t. When you imply that acting out my oppression make you oppressed too, it’s insulting. First, it makes a joke of what I am forced to do to live safely, and second, it implies if I acted differently, I wouldn’t be oppressed as a woman, which isn’t true.

2) It ignores the many trans women who are outspoken feminists and/or not conventionally feminine.

Lots of men call themselves feminists but it doesn't make them feminists or make them women. Calling yourself a feminist doesn’t make you a feminist any more than calling yourself a woman makes you a woman. (It doesn’t make you those things at all.)

3) Trans women do not transition out of a desire to be feminine; we transition out of a self-understanding that we are or should be female (commonly referred to as gender identity).

If there is no discernible biological condition that defines someone as a woman, as you argue before, then what are you transitioning to?

You are just adopting feminine stereotypes (but picking and choosing, mind you) and saying that makes you a woman. It doesn’t. Womanhood isn’t a feeling or an inner identity and to imply this is anti-woman because it sets the foundation for blaming us for our own position within an oppressed class.

4) Trans women who are conventionally feminine are not in any way asserting or insinuating that all women should be conventionally feminine, or that femininity is all there is to being a woman. Like cis women, trans women dress the way we do in order to express ourselves, not to critique or caricature other women.

You are asserting that feminine stereotypes make you a woman instead of what you are: a feminine man. And, by your language “[imply that] femininity is all there is to being a woman” you are implying that femininity (which is a set of cultural stereotypes) is at least part of being a woman. This is in conflict with your “identification only” mantra and it is proven false by every proud gender non-conforming woman and man out there.

5) This line of reasoning accuses trans women of arrogantly presuming to know what cis women experience, when we do no such thing. In reality, it’s the cis women who forward this accusation that are the ones arrogantly presuming to know what trans women experience and what motivates us.

You literally said in your last point: “Like cis women, trans women dress the way we do in order to express ourselves.” I do not dress the way I do in order to express myself; I dress this way in order to avoid violence in an extremely patriarchal society where women are expected to be covered or attacked. You just claimed to know my experience and motivations and you got it completely wrong.

As a trans woman, I will be the first to admit that I cannot possibly know what any other woman experiences or feels on the inside.

Then why have you spent this entire article constructing straw man arguments and insisting radical feminists believe things that we simply don’t? Your second sentence was a lie about something feminist and woman Chimimanda Ngozi Adichie said. How could you assume you have anything in common with us?

But the thing is, the trans-women-aren’t-women crowd cannot possibly know what any other woman experiences or feels either!

Actually, I do know what other women experience and feel because I am a woman. We have a shared experience as an oppressed class that you are not a part of. I’m glad you are acknowledging that you don’t know how we feel, but women around the world have the common experience of our biology and our socialization as the lesser sex according to that biology.

It’s the cis women who attempt to exclude us who seem to have a singular superficial stereotypical notion of what constitutes a woman, or of what women experience.

When you call the shared experiences of women under patriarchy “a singular superficial notion” you are arguing that sexism does not exist. Sexism has to have a definition in order to fight against it and that definition is the oppression of women as a class of people based on our reproductive biology.

Some cis feminists will extrapolate from this [trans people’s claims of sexed brains] that all trans people must hold highly essentialist beliefs about female-versus-male brains, and therefore that we are an affront to feminism. Often, they will make this case while simultaneously making essentialist claims themselves (e.g., regarding reproductive capacities) in order to undermine our identities.

The idea of different male and female brains is an affront to feminism because we know scientifically that our brains house our personality traits, intelligence, and memory and thus significantly affects how we act within society. Arguing that women have fundamentally different brains from men supports sexism by allowing men to argue our social circumstances are actually brought about by biological determination and that our lower place within society is valid because we are less intelligent or naturally drawn to certain tasks.

As a biologist, you should know that genitals serve a completely different purpose than the brain and does lead to different lived experiences for men and women. Even without the social construct of gender, women have pregnancies and men do not. To point out that male and female genitals are different is acknowledging material reality, whereas you are trying to construct your arguments upon subjective “identities.”

Radical feminists argue this material reality should not place women at a lower position within society or designate certain roles for us that have nothing to do with biology. Radical feminists accept our realities as people with vaginas and uteruses and the biological consequences of those things. What we do not accept is the unnecessary and oppressive social roles that have been created based upon them.

But here’s the thing: Rachel Dolezal is one person. In sharp contrast (as I alluded to earlier), transgender people are a pan-cultural and trans-historical phenomenon, and comprise approximately 0.2 – 0.3% of the population.

Prevalence does not make something good or healthy. A lot more than 0.3% of the population is sexist and that doesn’t mean sexism should be accepted in society. Since you can’t undermine that Rachel Dolezal acted out stereotypes and then called herself a black person and how this is directly linked to the trans phenomenon, you’re trying to argue that the problem is small.

According to the American news networks, white people “identify” as people of color to check those boxes on university and job applications to take advantage of affirmative action all the time. People confess to doing it. So the problem of people moving into spaces designated for certain marginalized groups—including people of color and women—is not small like you make it out to be.

I am Iraqi and I plan to study in the United States which means I have to require a special visa and still face possible rejection as a result of Trump’s travel ban on my country. (I’m not a Muslim, but the ban targets Muslim-majority countries and I live in one.) Still, I checked “white” on my university applications because it clearly states Middle Eastern people are white during that process. Marginalized Americans worked hard for those distinctions and I will not undermine their work by claiming to be someone I’m not. Maybe we can discuss a separate Middle Eastern category in the future, but I’m not going to claim to be black or Pacific Islander.

I have never once in my life heard a trans woman claim that our experiences are 100 percent identical to those of cis women.

Then what is your article even about? Why does the idea of women having our own spaces without trans women bother you? What is under threat here? Your “identity,” as you state above?

The problem isn’t that we (i.e., trans women) refuse to acknowledge any differences, but rather that the trans-women-aren’t-women crowd refuses to acknowledge our many similarities.

Feminism doesn’t focus on similarities because sexism doesn’t. “Why don’t we just all come together because we aren’t that different” says the person in a position of institutional power. Society tells people we are different and then as soon as you want something we have (that you have relegated us to) you claim to be just like us. Please.

There was a time in the 1960s and 1970s when many heterosexual feminists wanted to similarly exclude lesbians from women’s organizations and from feminism. The justifications that they forwarded were eerily similarly to trans-women-aren’t-women arguments: They accused lesbians of being “oppressively male” and of “reinforcing the sex class system.”

Lesbians are women and feminism is the movement to liberate women from sexism. Lesbians are biologically female and therefore women, whereas you are not. Many previous “feminists” have been racist and antisemitic as well, but people with common sense know black women and Jewish women are adult human females and therefore included in feminism. Biological males do not belong in feminism. Do not appropriate the struggles of lesbians.

Trans women are women. We may not be “exactly like” cis women, but then again, cis women are not all “exactly like” one another either. But what we do share is that we all identify and move through the world as women.

No, you are not women. You are biologically male and socialized as boys and then men. Not all women are exactly alike but we all have the shared experience of being biologically female and being treated accordingly. You do not have that experience. You do not move through the world as a woman, but as a man pretending he is a woman.

I said at the outset, forcing trans women into a separate group that is distinct from cis women does not in any way help achieve feminism’s central goal of ending sexism. In fact, it only serves to undermine our collective cause.

Sexism is rooted in biological sex. You are a biological male and in this way you are distinct from biological females and we do not have to include you in our mission to liberation ourselves from oppression by men.

What is our collective cause? What are your goals and how do you hope to achieve them? What are you doing to help women other than writing about how we exclude you because you are a man? How do you define sexism?

Your piece is riddled with incoherent arguments and you attempt to paint radical feminism as illogical when, in fact, radical feminism can be used to logically dismantle all your arguments and point to a clear foundation for women’s oppression.

This work starts with a falsehood and ends with a vague assertion that feminists, by asking for our own spaces free from men, are hurting ourselves when actually, you have only argued how these actions hurt you and men like you. You have blamed women for our own oppression throughout this article and yet you expect us to take you in with open arms and validate your identity because that is the only thing that you believe ties you to womanhood.

It doesn’t, and we’re not here to entertain you.

[andwesang-blog]

how to combat racism (in a non-post-racial society)

This article is, in its essence, a guide for people who believe themselves to be "woke, intelligent individuals on how to challenge racism. This article is based on the premise that It is not nearly enough to say that you are against racism, but you must actively oppose it;  simply put, you can't just talk about it, you've got to be about it. In this article, we will look at the ways in which whiteness pervades all aspects of culture, as well as the ways in which to turn white privilege on its head and talk to white people about it (as a white person). The reason I believe it is important for white people who are "woke" to speak out in white spaces is that black voices are simply not being listened to. In cultural spaces black voices are often either excluded completely or included with the strict proviso that the attending black person must behave well (meaning not upset his fragile white colleagues). If one subverts the predominant narrative that black is inherently evil, it is met with resistance and "White rage". As Carol Anderson points out in her book "White rage - The unspoken truth of our racial divide", every movement for equal rights for people of colour has been met with anger, hostility and fierce opposition. This is what I was referring to when I mentioned a scarcity mindset, as if somehow black rights, or to love black people, means you can no longer have any love left over for white people.

1. Understanding your privilege

This section is fairly brief as it requires the reader to take matters into their own hands and do some reading. There will be a short reading list at the end of the article but don't be afraid to branch out. There are plenty of books on white privilege and reading a breadth of material on this subject will be useful not only as a tool to combat racism but as a tool to develop critical thinking. This may sound condescending but the main problem with racist thinking is that it is inherently (as Edward C Lawson put it) "Intellectual cowardice". Basing your arguments on pseudo-facts and anecdotal evidence is the beginning of bad reasoning and ultimately the demise of your respectability. What we need to understand is that our systems, our institutions, schools, hospitals, churches, are built on imperialism and racism. If it weren’t for England becoming the world’s premier slave trader, this country wouldn’t have the wealth it does. Britain was so heavily involved in the slave trade that in order to make abolition even a possibility, the British government had to take out a loan from the Bank of England to compensate the slave owners, the debt was so massive that it was only paid off in 2015. 

The reason we don't have a white history month is clear - Every month is white history month. Even the names of the months are references to white Roman leaders. The schools are a reflection of the dominant culture's narrative that places white Europeans as the norm and places people of colour as the other. In order to challenge and subvert these ideals, we must be willing to bear the brunt of angry, culturally displaced white people, who must now face the task of reimagining their identity in the modern world. Why this is necessary is clear to anyone with a basic understanding of history and the current state of affairs. For those that claim we live in a post-racial society, I would suggest you do one thing. Go to your Instagram or social media account and follow a couple of pro-black Instagram channels. Soon enough your feed will fill up with disturbing images of black men and women being killed by white police officers and other every day tragedies that you wouldn’t wish on your worst enemy. 

2. Race in the workplace 

In order to address race in the workplace, we should start by looking over a case that is close to home for me.  My own story is one that highlights the propensity of both white men and women to use their respective privileges in order to maintain a status quo that places them as the saviour of the poor lost black boy.

A white woman I was seeing took offense to my comment that I would find it difficult to marry a white woman and have children with her because of the difference in experience. I also said that the way we might relate our experiences of the police, for example, would be different, also instilling a sense of black pride in a child is infinitely more powerful coming from a mother who has herself lived that experience. Several days later I received an email that was incredibly emotional and accused me of being racist. 

The problem with educating yourself on topics such as race is that once you begin speaking on the issue you are ostracised, often labeled as an “angry black man” or “Anti-White” or having a chip on your shoulder. Coming to know my own blackness has been a journey fraught with difficulty and resistance. What started as a difference in opinion was then escalated (by the woman in question) into a work issue. She called my boss after I refused to talk to her (A grossly inappropriate move) even though the two of them had met only a handful of times and were hardly ‘close’. What’s more troubling is that my employer took it upon himself to chastise my “behaviour” going on to call me “self-righteous” and “putting white people below me”.

“Pro-Black” is often appropriated for “Anti-White” and in this case, my willingness to express my view that it would be hard for a white woman to fully understand what it means to raise a mixed-race son was met with aggression, silencing, channel switching and outright denial. I believe that comparing race with gender can be problematic, but please bear with my example: (Speaking to my employer) X, if your partner came to you after doing research and said “X, I’ve been doing some reading and sometimes the things you say to me are not only hurtful, but I think that they are sexist and inappropriate.” Would you A) Thank her for her feedback and work on changing your behaviour. Or, B) Tell her that she’s being too aggressive and hurting his feelings? An intelligent and reasonable person would take the feedback and work on changing their behaviour.

I put my story of what happened along with a commentary on my personal Instagram story. According to my boss, explaining your views to people is a step too far. In an attempt to silence me he used emotional triggers, getting defensive, withdrawing from the conversation, using aggression to try to control the dialogue. Instead of having a fair and logical conversation, emotion was brought to the forefront with my boss angrily slamming drawers closed, acting in a hostile, petulant manner. Calling me “self-righteous” and “grandiose” for expressing my view is indicative of privilege that lives on through acts of omission. The bringing of race to the forefront of people’s consciousness makes people feel uncomfortable. This discomfort should not be met with aggression and a desire to control and dominate. 

3. How to challenge racism (Talking to white people in white spaces as a white person) 

If you consider yourself to be a white person who is “woke” it is your duty to talk to other white people about race. We cannot disect race without white people talking to other white people about their white privilege. In some contexts, you risk funny looks, snarky comments and even losing relationships. That’s what it costs to be "woke”. As we have already established, black voices are not being listened to by the majority of white people; we need smart, educated and enlightened white people like yourself to speak on these issues and to help the cause. When you hear someone make a racist joke, challenge it. When somebody says something that you know to be racially problematic, explain to them why it's not acceptable to say things like that. When your mum or dad, or brother or sister, or whoever bemoans that there is no white history month, educate them on the tyranny and colonial mindset that has repressed people of colour for several hundred years and why a celebration of black culture and history is necessary. 

Reading List: 

White Fragility - Robin Diangelo 

Why I'm no longer talking to white people about race - Reni Eddo Lodge

A small place - Jamaica Kincaid

Brit (ish) - Afua Hirsch

[polyrolemodels]

How Representation Works...or Doesn't

How Representation Works...or Doesn't A Follow-Up

In the early afternoon of Thursday May 11th, I got an email from a colleague. First, she congratulated me on my upcoming book about the intersection of race and polyamory, then she congratulated me on my appearance in the New York Times. The piece, Is an Open Marriage a Happier Marriage?, had just been published that morning. The congrats were both a friendly greeting and a way to lead into the real content of the email while also saying, “I see you there, Kev. Doing big things.”

The true purpose of the email was to ask if I'd be interested in taking part in a round table about family and parenting. Eventually, I would respond that I was indeed interested. But before I had a chance to even read that email, I received a second one from the same colleague. Delivered only eleven minutes after the first, it simply read “Oh my gosh, Kevin! I just read the article. You must be upset. I’m so sorry!” While this wasn't the way my day started, it pretty much encapsulated how the whole day went. Boundless excitement followed quickly by frustrating disappointment.

My wife and I contributed to Is an Open Marriage a Happier Marriage? because our names were thrown into consideration by Mark A. Michaels and Patricia Johnson, the authors of Designer Relationships: A Guide to Happy Monogamy, Positive Polyamory, and Optimistic Open Relationships. Mark and Patricia are familiar with the impact nonmonogamy has on our family and our work regarding race and polyamory. Logically, they thought we'd offer some insightful perspective to such a piece. And what a mainstream piece! I’d be lying if I said that hadn’t factored into my decision to participate. My Poly Role Models blog, while a fairly popular free resource, couldn’t hope to hit the broadcast range of even the lowliest New York Times article. An increased readership could help countless people find their way to and through ethical non-monogamy. Unfortunately, any perspective I could add or range I could reach is buried beneath a sad story of floundering marriages. To be clear, the sad story of floundering marriages are both valid and valuable. My work definitely covers that as well. But it covers more than that...and therein lies the problem.

Is an Open Marriage a Happier Marriage? is predominantly the story of a married couple, Elizabeth and Daniel, who have grown dissatisfied in their lives together. Their mismatched libidos create an unbearable strain on what was otherwise a happy union. If you’ve ever been in a similar situation, you understand. Sexual incompatibility is such a weighty factor that it can severely hamper strong relationships; even if it’s the sole stressor. In response to the growing displeasure, Daniel researched ethical non-monogamy and discussed it with his wife. What followed was not ethical non-monogamy.

Elizabeth shot the idea down. Only to find romance with a new fellow anyway. First, behind her husband’s back, then to his face without his willful participation...despite his pain. The guy Elizabeth took up with? He was also unhappily married and cheating on his spouse. He didn’t even have the benefit of an unresolved conversation about the vague possibility of opening his marriage to use as a justification. Look, I’m not judging. Unreasonable expectations of exclusivity, in the face of incompatible sex drives, need to be discussed.  Partners that come to ethical non-monogamy by way of infidelity needs to be discussed. These are already being discussed. In fact, the idea that ethical and consensual non-monogamy are just the product of unhappy marriages is already the predominant narrative. We've heard these stories before. They get pushed out to mainstream media every few months and frankly it's gotten boring.

It’s clear that Susan Dominus has a specific story that she is trying to tell. But I question who that really serves. The non-monogamous newcomers, who don’t fit this couple-centric view, won’t find any love here. In this article, they are either outsiders or at the whim of a shaky marriage that views them as a crutch. Even those who do fit in the coupled model, on display here, don’t have much to look forward to. The stable and happy couples featured are virtually voiceless in this article. What little speech we’re given is limited to seemingly reluctant acceptance of the situation we’ve found ourselves in.

The name of the article challenges the traditional views on marriage with the idea of a happier alternative. So, where was that? I know you’re not supposed to read the comments section, but I did. What I found was dozens of people remarking about how unhappy people are in open marriages… how easy it is to spot which partner is into it and which is just going along with it… how it’s all just about finding excuses to cheat. That’s the story these readers came into this article believing. With all of it’s sad photos and stories of even sadder partnerships, those readers are left with a pretty solid confirmation of their pre-established attitudes. For those with lived experience inside of ethical non-monogamy, we are left with yet another narrowed view on a life we know to be both varied and vibrant.

As someone who provides a platform for dozens of true accounts of ethical non-monogamy, I’ve learned that each one resonates with those who need to find themselves and their experiences validated. Obviously, you can’t tell every story in a single article but then why gather a wealth of resources that serve to expand the perspective? Authors like Eve Rickert, Franklin Veaux, Patricia Johnson, and Mark Michaels were all consulted and left out. Twelve thousand words are a lot of space to flesh out an idea. Especially with tons of time and energy spent on taking photos of the whole shebang. With the bulk of the content focused on unphotographed people using aliases, why were our names and faces used... only to ignore our observations?

Now, I’m not flat out saying that my wife and I are only included as token people of color. I am challenging anyone to show me what the difference would be if we were. Our voices are mostly unused, but our faces are pretty prominent in a photo that shocked the people in our lives. One friend said it is the saddest they’ve ever seen either of us look. Another said that, without context, they would’ve believed all of the photos to be from a story about divorce. A visual storyline to match the narrative of non-exclusive but unsatisfying marriages.

In the case of sexuality, the article is almost devoid of mentions… except in regard to the single gay couple, Logan and Robert. Though there was valuable insight in the bit of text dedicated to their perspective, their voices were mostly left out as well. In an article that read as extremely heteronormative, there were no occurrences of the words “lesbian”, “bisexual”, “pansexual”, “queer”, or “trans”. There were six mentions of the word “gay”. Five in a single paragraph containing a reference to gay advice columnist Dan Savage and the two sentences from one of that couple’s husbands. The sixth “gay” is some dude’s name. Again, maybe Logan and Robert are not included as token LGBT representation. But how would it have looked differently otherwise?

What we’re missing is proper representation. Better representation. At least better than having our identities used as a prop to tell a story that doesn’t see us or accurately reflect us. At least better than an edgy title that doesn’t even bother to get out of it’s own way. By which I mean, letting a story write itself with the pieces you put together. A great example of which would be Daniel Krieger’s Polyamorous People feature for Narratively’s People of Interest series. In which, Krieger trusted his subjects to be both interesting and honest without trying to force either. The results are a much wider set of experiences, along a broader range of personal identities, done in roughly a quarter of the word count.

The ideal solution to any of our image problems is simply to tell our own stories. Non-monogamy already bucks convention by its very nature. We come from all walks of life and practice our lifestyles in countlessly diverse ways. We don’t need to be made into a compelling story. We already are. The story isn’t how we exist, it’s that we exist. All we need to do is open our mouths to speak our own truths. When someone on the outside of us attempts to speak for us, regardless of the platform, they carry in their preconceived notions...and worse they carry their desire to shoehorn us into those notions. While I thank and appreciate the New York Times for trying, what they gave us was not nearly what was promised or expected or needed.

But, hey… I guess it could be worse. At least there weren’t any stock photos of three pairs of white feet sticking out from under a white duvet.

[perahn]

Codex Entry

For @circlingmoon, for DMing and encouraging me to be the amoral Red Wizard who always lurked within.

This text is written in a fiendishly difficult encryption, consisting of at least two different ciphers per page. It is difficult to infer reading order; on some pages the writing flows across the page in the left-to-right fashion of Common, on others it appears to spiral out from a central point, while others appear horizontal or completely random. A multitude of different coloured inks form part of the coding. Once the text has been decrypted, the reader must be fluent in Thayan Mulhorandi, Draconic and Infernal, and possess a basic understanding of Undercommon for the later pages, as the journal is written in a peculiar mixture of the vocabulary and grammar of all four languages.

This is a calculated risk. There are certain of my thoughts and secrets that must be preserved and not simply remembered. Neither method is secure, of course… any mind is open to one sufficiently skilled, and if my own mind were to be broken, these petty ciphers would be easily extracted. For the moment, my own positioning is protection enough: I am seen as powerful enough to be useful, but not enough to be a threat, and there are few enough of my rivals or clique who are perspicacious enough to make a better assessment.

Nebastis appears to be playing a similar game, but her analysis of the situation on the Alaor betrayed an overly acute understanding of the historical forces at play. I believe she would be worth cultivating…

A span of pages, some of which appears to describe the daily life of a Red Wizard student, some to record dreams, some to be detailed equations or spellwork diagrams, and one which is a poorly-drawn depiction of a wyvern and a phoenix in battle.

… all arranged with Nebastis. I have paid the doorkeeper the customary amount to ensure we won’t be disturbed. He probably supplements his income handsomely by guarding these little trysts – but there are simply not that many pieces of neutral territory within the Academy, and at times ambition and caution must give way to more primal needs.

She said, “I trust you.” I could never have guessed how exciting – how erotic – those three words could be.

She watches my lips, and licks hers.

I watch her fingers – their slender shape, their clever, delicate movements – and I imagine.

I have never known impatience like this, as though fire burns beneath my skin. Nebastis. Less than hour remains.

The next entry is on the same page. The time marker indicated a span of one hour and twenty minutes since the commencement of the previous entry.

That was eminently satisfying. It appears I had credited Nebastis with far more cunning than she deserved. When she said that she trusted me and that she desired me, she was being entirely truthful. She did not even look twice at the spells I had cast around our meeting place.

So she is eliminated, and with less effort than it took to remove Pteptah or Se-atma from the game board. I am almost ready to neutralise Nofet.

A good deal of what follows is undeciphered at present, but proper names and ‘eliminated’ tends to recur, as do dreams about ‘the Erratic’, ‘the Silent’, ‘the Thirsty’ and skulls, buried beneath mountains and by water.

… The monastery of the Long Death is a known quantity, of course, but individual monks remain unpredictable variables. I have recognised this Shayazi assigned to me as one of the recurring, although I am not certain which she represents as yet. The monks do refer to death as the ‘Silent Lord’… Still, a preliminary assessment is necessary.

Physically, she poses a deadly threat. The monks’ training is extensive, honing her naturally muscular form into a mechanism that will strike both swiftly and with certainty. She would be difficult to catch off-guard. She evidences no magic, whether innate, studied or talismanic. By preference, she fights in melee; I would keep her at range should it become necessary to neutralise her. Spells that target her strength of personality would probably succeed, as she appears to spend much of her energy on controlling an innate rage… no doubt the curse of her orcish heritage. How glad I am for the superiority of my pure Mulan blood! She also appears to have an inexhaustible appetite and capacity for alcohol, and so is eminently suitable for a properly calibrated dose of the correct poison.

Shayazi is not stupid, but the monks’ education was certainly… limited. She is so focused on her pointless studies of thanatology (not uninteresting, admittedly, but impractical) that she would be easy to deceive on any matter that fell outside that narrow scope. Nor do I believe that the Long Death monks learn the ruthless political manoeuvring which is a part of Academy life, which is doubtless why the Red Wizards rule Thay and the monks play no significant role in the wider world.

For the moment, however, she appears to perceive my protection as a duty, and one she takes very seriously indeed. I shall encourage her to continue in that vein by any means necessary. She cannot be trusted, of course, but she is undeniably an asset as long she chooses to be so. She balances many of my weaknesses, and she is, moreover, enjoyable company. It is, of course, entirely possible that much of my current assessment is flawed, depending on Shayazi’s ability to dissimulate. I shall continue to monitor and reassess.

Additional notes appear to follow at various dates and times. The following pages seem to detail the writer’s experiences of a long voyage by sea, including some difficulty with sea-sickness. Dreams of eyes, and a woman who cuts off her hand and laughs for joy, predominate.

Initial Assessment: Khetad? Kheteeth? Mornir? Mulnar? That sorceress.

I know she is one of the recurring, and therefore necessary in some measure to my goals. At the same time, I find myself thinking longingly of all the ways to strip a sorceress of their magic and make them useful. She is a sterling example of all the worst traits of her kind. She relies on poorly-understood and internalised processes to wield magic that was left in her blood by some remote ancestor. It is alien to the wizards’ way of controlled and disciplined magic earned by effort; it is sloppy, disorganised, and inelegant in every way.

In situations like these, however, it has its advantages for me. It is possible to map at least some of the spells at her command; sorcerers do not learn quickly. It can be surmised that she has more spells than these, if she follows the usual developmental pattern for sorcerers.

Cantrips: Fire Bolt (used to light a candle, and offensively). Ray of Frost (used to cool her drink, and offensively). Shocking Grasp (used when pinching Harper’s buttocks, when he was looking at a barmaid). Prestigitation (used for numerous flashy effects to prop up her projected image of dangerous sorceress, including redoing her cosmetics).

Level 1: Magic Missile (fired in the air to impress a customs officer. Failed). Thunderwave (used against a gang of attacking kobolds. Effective).

Level 2: Shatter (attack of ogres. Destroyed several of the caravans we were travelling with).

I have never met anyone quite so childish, and that includes actual children. She is obsessed with maintaining her ‘dangerous Elven sorceress’ image, and so would be uniquely vulnerable to manipulation aimed at that point. Any Suggestion along the lines of ‘A sorceress as powerful as you should be able to –‘ should succeed admirably. Unless, of course, this is a manufactured flaw. Sometimes she seems too insistent on her part to be genuine in it.

It is maddening, however, that she amuses many of those we have met, instead of rightly garnering irritation or contempt. It must be some peculiarity of all these illogical people. I miss my Academy, where motivations and behaviours made sense, where I knew the rules by which everyone played…

In short, I believe I could neutralise this Khayteed, if she were isolated, under most circumstances. I do not believe she plans well, and she seems too self-obsessed to study others well; I doubt she would see me coming. An overt attack is even less desirable than usual, given her focus on Evocation magic, although if Shay could be manipulated properly, she would make an excellent counter. However, in most conceivable situations which involve eliminating Khedded, Taliesin Harper must be considered.

Initial Assessment: Taliesin Harper.

By far the most conspicuous threat of all the recurring – not least because my Detect Thoughts failed. He remains too much of an unknown at this point. He has clearly trained with both melee and ranged weaponry; he appears to favour the former, but it is too early to be sure. He could certainly put an arrow in Shay before she could reach him. He seems intelligent and socially capable, and I am inclined to believe that he could play a part better than most. Sometimes he reminds me of others I knew back home…

It is so difficult to make any useful observations. His motivations are completely unknown. He and Kheited seem to have been travelling together for some time. She regards him as her property, but his attitude towards her is harder to place. For the present I can only assume that she is beneficial, in some measure, to whatever his plans truly are, but it is all so nebulous. He has attempted some flirtation with me, upon occasion; I am not minded to encourage it until I have a clearer understanding of why, and of whether the danger he presents outweighs the possible benefits.

He is on his own territory, and he understands the ways power is expressed and controlled in this land; I am far from my Academy. If the situation were reversed, he would be easy prey. As it is, I must be exceedingly cautious. He would not be as easy to Suggest as Khedit; his weaknesses are not so well displayed. He has not, as yet, exhibited any habits which could be leveraged to my advantage. I am acutely aware that most of my study has been aimed to help me neutralise other spellcasters. So much more information is necessary before I can plan effectively… I despise feeling this vulnerable.

More observations and dreams follow, as well as several pages of potential strategies for learning more of the individuals the writer has assessed. Many have been crossed out or marked as ‘impractical’, ‘obvious’ or ‘dangerous’.

I am very ready to be out of this rain. What sort of developmentally-damaged masochists would choose to dwell in a climate like this? Still, I am informed that we should reach Waterdeep tomorrow evening…

[claraoswald81]

What is SEO? And Why Should You Care?

As we all reach the fourth quarter of 2017, it's time to start considering about the year ahead plus what to anticipate from SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION in 2018. The acronym PASO appears for Personal Assistant Search Marketing, and it is referred in order to the use of SEO strategies with the aim of placement content as the source associated with the answers provided by Private Assistants (PAs) such as Siri and Google Assistant to their particular users. SEO SERVICES There are the number of SEO services which usually can help improve the lookup engines engine rankings of the website. This brand-new paradigm of users relying upon voice search for many associated with their search needs will end up being a game changer for SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION. These are the actual SEO strategies that have helped to enhance our natural search engine traffic (unique visitor) by 35. 36% in just 30 days. And well, for his or her own particular reasons from the above features, 12. 7% of the worldwide SEO professionals chose Mobile SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION and 11. 3% of all of them chose Local SEO to end up being the most impactful Google modify on SEO skills. Working as a Jr. Electronic Marketing Specialist with Circa Online, she has gained experience within SEO and higher education content material marketing while cultivating her innovative skills. Combined with the ever-changing research engine algorithms goes the ever-evolving search engine optimization (SEO) exercise. The use of tone of voice search technology is the cause why voice search SEO may be so popular in 2018. By perfect I not just mean SEO-wise but also content-wise like this article, so you keep people on your own site and also generate business from this. Send me a topic via email and I'll write something for you personally. Once you are into SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION, Google Zero rank or quantity one spot is basically the particular favorite location for everyone. As SEO guidelines evolve, the very unlikely ranking hack is definitely emerging. SEO helps to make a great image for the website simply by creating blogs, adding to brand-new material and new site hyperlinks towards the website to create it remain active on various search platforms. Most people in SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION (myself included) divide keywords straight into three main categories: head, entire body and the (long) tail. Today, this article will offer Top 10 SEO Trends That will Will Matter in 2018 plus which will also help within improving the rank of the particular business domain and website or any type of related landing page. Organic SEO is not therefore easy to attain for brand name spanking new websites. 2017 has noticed the predominance of Accelerated Portable Pages by Google, the excursion of HTTPS and the importance of backlinks became a requirement for any SEO professional. Paid techniques that are easily scalable, such as Facebook ads or a Search engines AdWords pay-per-click campaign can assist to drive revenue when you invest the time required to enjoy the advantages of SEO. On the subject of speed, at the beginning of 2017 there was still much resistance to AMP in the SEO community overall, but as we head toward 2018 that feels to be dissipating now somewhat with a reluctant acceptance that AMPLIFYING DEVICE looks as though it's not really going away sooner. Marketing experience, since the ability to establish our audience, understand their conduct, and anticipate their needs along with proper answers and solution will be tied directly (keyword and relevant research) and indirectly (search consumer experience and users' metrics) in order to earning the widest SEO presence. The online marketing arena getting an open space for many offers even the small-sized businesses having a fair chance to make make use of of the SEO practices plus generate income from organic potential clients in the digital space. So, let us find out there what new SEO trends within 2018 is likely to tag history. The particular team of SEO experts within Digital Marketers India is well-behaved and experienced in marketing various industry verticals. Based on the particular survey, 77% of our clients voted for user experience because the main SEO trend regarding 2018. Google offers the free web service called Search engines Search Console which allows a person to analyse your website's information, and gives you a indication of how you can optimize your website to be capable to increase visibility and SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION. The Search Console will help you evaluate your keyword rankings, CTRs, probable Google penalties and many various other useful data for technical SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION. Using wider keywords is crucial for your own SEO plan, and improves your own ranking in search results. Today, as u got to understand about the strategic SEO Tendencies of 2018, make sure a person have the best team or even maybe the best service company to work on them having a striking marketing strategy. It downloads the competition's most profitable keywords across both paid and organic search, giving you previously unthinkable regarding your rivals' SEO and content marketing strategies. One of the trends I actually expect to see in 2018, that will have a substantial impact on all facets associated with SEO, is the increasing part of artificial intelligence. SEO will promptly include many methods from content, link acquisition, UX plus endpoint delivery like fast launching pages through AMP Google More rapid Mobile Pages. Mimvi SEO is definitely your online business growth companion. Visual search will be another growing section of SEO that will combines technological innovation and UX. As the internet becoming even more visually focused, so does the particular development of powerful correlating research engines. Now SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION trends 2018 have to match with limited real estate property, preliminary cable connections in addition to all these people already deal with. The shift toward long-tail keywords will be even more necessary to SEO success in 2018. I firstly read your own SEO strategy: #1 Ranking Along with Guestographics, I really liked therefore. And when you tailor your own on-page SEO around the perfect keywords, you'll watch your web site rocket to the top associated with Google — landing you even more traffic, leads, sales along the particular way. Analyze the top 3 search results with any keywords density tool or Chrome extension, like SEOquake This is enough to form a list of relevant keywords and synonyms. Intended for businesses looking to raise their particular search engine rankings, it signifies that a comprehensive social mass media strategy might be in purchase - in addition to just about all the usual SEO tactics. This used to be the bigger factor in SEO, however it still provides a high quality user experience when done properly, increasing actions.

SEO differs from nearby search engine optimization in that will the latter is targeted upon optimizing a business' online existence so that its web web pages is going to be shown by search engines when the user enters a local research for its products or providers. In a latest survey by Hubspot only 9% of businesses using inbound advertising with SEO failed to observe an ROI. Right now, the only way to show up in the search engine webpages like this is by publishing your videos on You Pipe or through video SEO. SEO requires an understanding associated with how search engines work, exactly what individuals search for, and exactly why and how people search. While Search engines makes it near impossible in order to completely crack its page rank algorithm code, constantly adjusting in order to accommodate one thousand different detailed aspects will be the challenge with regard to SEOers in 2018 and a lot of a long time. In order to get them, you'll have in order to read other blogs that examine between the lines of exactly what Google representatives are saying which usually publish data that illuminates the results, say, of a new formula change or that tries in order to determine is new ranking elements are taking effect when Search engines isn't being clear about can be going on. The comments upon posts in this blog are usually often worth reading, even in case just to see what some other SEO professionals are thinking. Google, Bing, plus Yahoo have been the well-known search engines that were favored to make SEO decisions simply by professionals. Very first, you need to understand just how local SEO differs from normal SEO for businesses that depend on customers from all more than the world. Long tail keywords may be very profitable to your own SEO strategy and narrow straight down on the needs of particular customers by using descriptive lengthy tail keywords which can end up being very useful to boost traffic. One of the particular most important parts of the particular SEO is creating unique with ease with proper keywords. I predict the particular biggest SEO trend in 2018 will be companies and people diving into video as the particular written content space gets even more competitive. But there are usually some affordable SEO trends that you might use in 2018 to position your page in Google. Another more modern post is simply titled How to Write for SEO” Advice includes writing from a customer's perspective, forgetting concerning the hoary idea of keyword density, creating supplemental content for your site and much more. And you can see the section on where you can use key words for more information on integrating these keywords into your SEO content strategy. According to a research conducted by BrightEdge, a innovator in SEO and content overall performance suggests that 57% of visitors as of now comes through smartphones and tablets. On the other hand, SEOs have to understand what the customers are searching for then create awesome, relevant, quality articles for them. Without quality links, your web page will probably not rank quite high in search, even if a person have excellent copy or make use of every other SEO ranking aspect out there. Within case your website is produced up of lower-quality doorway kind pages using old SEO-techniques (which more and more labelled since spam in 2018) then Search engines will not index all associated with the pages and your internet site ‘quality score' is probably heading to be negatively impacted. Voice search is another one particular of the latest trends within SEO that will be impacting search engine optimization in 2018. Most SEOs use third-party tools to figure out exactly what people are looking for, just how users are looking for issues, and use that to boost their content. SEOs have understood user research intent to fall broadly directly into the following categories and right now there is an excellent post upon Moz about this. The phrase "SEO" can also refer to "Search Engine Optimizer". To get more exposure within visual searches, make sure that will likes, shares and comments upon social media posts all have got SEO relevance. Because there was a lot of positive reviews and I am just along the way of perfecting local SEO and local company lead generation online. The organization offers excellent SEO packages that will help rank the clients' site within top three pages associated with search engine pages. Google's always tweaking its search algorithms, so there is no guarantee that SEO techniques that worked in the past will keep doing work in the future. The particular growth of Google's featured little, voice search, Local SEO, plus PPC gives better lead in order to diverting traffic to your web site as compared to the natural listing. Ensuing, new SEO trends of 2018 are evolved. SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION today, particularly link building, is about relationships because ranking highly needs quality links from authoritative web sites. Well right now there are more than enough affects of SEO but the nearly all worth mentioning impacts of this are typically consisted of enhanced website visibility, availability of natural traffic, rapid sales volume, consistent return on investment (ROI), inexpensive business promotion and marketing, improved website exposure and awareness, long lasting business identity development, and aggressive edge over the other companies in the global marketplace. Power Suggestion: Like with a blog article, I've found that you obtain a slight video SEO increase by putting your keyword in the beginning of the name. The good news is usually that there are plenty associated with excellent tools you can make use of to tackle SEO and acquire the data you need in order to improve your rankings. Once the article is drafted up, it's time for an SEO check always via Yoast (WordPress Plugin).

Internal linking is amongst the major aspects of SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION as with the aid associated with it you can direct visitors to your other pages plus posts too. The thing regarding YouTube Google rankings since Apr 2014 Google had a main update, many vseo have already been crying but the option might be pretty simple. This particular may not sound like a good advanced SEO strategy, but you needed be surprised the number associated with websites are missing basic on-page SEO like page titles or even descriptions. But this has a nice SEO advantage to boot: multimedia helps a person boost those user-interaction signals that will Google continues to be spending more attention to. I feel looking to rank with the key phrase online jobs but as the particular URL is long & the particular keyword is in the finish associated with the URL, I am not really ranking on the first place even after my page and my SEO is way better than various other first 3 ranked sites. SEO is almost all about backlinks, right?

This offpage SEO activity became immensely popular after Google's Gary Illyes revealed that a thriving community can boost SERP rankings immensely. For example, Copyblogger focuses on the keyword SEO copywriting” upon one of their landing web pages. In 2108, you will have at minimum five SEO trends no company can afford not to get advantage of. These trends can be the cornerstone of achievement for hundreds of new plus thriving businesses, which will furthermore determine the end result associated with their future success. In our previous blog, we all discuss the fundamentals of SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION and significance of on web page SEO; but it can furthermore be very true that in order to bring the website for the very first page of Google, it actually is imperative to put energy on off page as properly as on page SEO. SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION is really a holistic work of all pieces of the company, including social media, advertising, web design, networking and copywriting. During this phase we furthermore perform tasks like keyword study (for existing pages), on page” SEO corrections, schema markups plus more. As far since I know, this only functions for HTML or CSS webpages - I don't go very much for Flash websites, and was am not sure how that will pans out with respect in order to search engines and SEO. SEO is definitely targeted on organic search outcomes — arriving at the top associated with the list when a consumer searches for keywords related in order to your business. With no Local SEO program in place your company may not be able to consider advantage of the local on the internet demand for your products or even services. If a person want higher rankings, you require to read his stuff -- he's the Unicorn among the sea of donkey SEOs. Every business is limited in order to its own budget for customization organic marketing results and the particular SEO professionals' aim is in order to make the most of elaborate allotted. Consequently, Link Building is a single the most important in the particular list of ‘SEO trends 2018'.

Naturally, the developments in SEO strategies vary significantly and rather rapidly, making this essential for marketers to maintain track from the necessary adjustments that need to be made to improve user experience. Their full thoughts are usually catalogued in our annual e-book The eBook, titled ‘The Best Explained SEO in 2018: fifty Insiders on the Future associated with Search, ' provides detailed information about from GDRP to Amazon . com Alexa. 2018 is just about all about getting the victory, exactly where the SEO success will not really depend on how you handle and optimize your website regarding Google, rather, Google will today search for the technical specifications, which are simple but should. The particular user experience reaches the primary of your SEO strategy. It will end up being helpful if you share a few on-page SEO tips and exactly how to perform a keyword study. It can important that you think associated with your SEO strategy and objectives if you map out all associated with your other internet marketing programs, as they can help boost your engine optimization with small to no extra effort, apart from some creative thinking. With Google analyzing sites based on hundreds associated with ranking factors, knowing where in order to aim your SEO strategy within 2018 for that biggest bang may seem impossible. SEO, in an ever-changing technical landscape, means an ongoing procedure of re-imagining how we look at search and what we are usually able to learn from this. It's not just seeing search positions as an end, but since a way of studying just how search engines use our articles to serve their users. Knowing that, smart SEOs are starting to optimize a few of their content for tone of voice search. We have some excellent rankings, but we have already been always looking to improve plus see the actual future keeps for SEO. Rather not surprisingly, Google recently stated that content material and links remain the best two ranking factors — RankBrain is #3 — when most likely overlooking quality content and hyperlinks — the foundation of prosperous SEO since the dawn associated with time — you may not really get the rankings you wish. While links are usually still important and it's really incredibly challenging to rank well without hyperlinks from other websites, content plus on-page SEO is becoming progressively important.

SEO has been enjoying a significant role in rating up your website, and this has been even misused simply by many to get the unnecessary content on top of the particular search engines. Considering simply how much effort it will take to have a quality SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION campaign, many people choose in order to outsource any part of this. To stay afloat with SEO in 2018, create sure that you're optimizing for that user, not the search motor. In this fast developing world, SEO techniques always maintain changes time to time plus the worst part is that will you simply might not also know it. That's why a person always need to stay up-to-date using the latest trends and strategies in SEO. From the particular basics of how search motors work and how they position the websites to the superior understanding of SEO tools plus techniques, a training course can cover the entire spectrum associated with Online marketing skills. If RankBrain will turn out to be more and more influential within rankings, which is very probably, that means that SEO's can start optimizing more and a lot more for user experience instead associated with other factors. These are called SEO ranking factors. In order to help you stay on best of those changes, this write-up will cover SEO trends that will are already noticeable as properly as the best practices in order to improve digital marketing strategy regarding the business. Topics include; Perform you know the best procedures for Local SEO? ”, Search engines My Business optimisation”, Local SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION Keyword Research”, and other innovative tactics that will help your own business get more exposure, visitors, and customers. SEO provides become a crucial piece in order to this shift, as people research for information or products through Google around 5 billion instances every single day. This article will focus on on-page optimization, and am will become sharing lots of good on-page SEO techniques you should put into action while working on optimizing your blog site posts. This is why correct SEO seo is so essential. If you have got an old site in inclusion to just started to determine out SEO and it also just hit you that OMG, none associated with the keywords I've researched are usually in any of my URLs”, you need to skip the particular whole URL changing process. It gets much better: when you publish SEO-optimized Youtube . com videos, you'll own more Search engines real estate. SEO landscape will be dynamic and there is the greater need to stay within touch with the changing styles and adopt optimization techniques that will help you boost your on-line visibility. nineteen. Page Load Speed @jambad 2018 SEO Trends - 5 Strategies to Stay Ahead of the particular Curve What we already know… 2016 - Slow webpages raise bounce rate Study by Search engines, (Akamai) 53% of mobile customers abandon sites that longer compared to 3 seconds to load. In a fast plus results-based world, voice search can continue to be a part SEO 2019 PDF of SEO's future, and we may discover a moment where it could surpass traditionally written searches. The Future of SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION is here: Understanding and Marketing and advertising to Specific and Defined Viewers through Search Engines. ” properly quoted by Adam Audette, Primary Knowledge Officer, RKG a functionality Marketing Agency. Whenever people at Internet Retail Expo, came up with the query showing how to do SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION for eCommerce sites, it had been decently answered by a specialist.